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NOV 22 113, 



THE 



LIFE OF CHRIST IN THE WORLD 



SERMONS 



BY THE 



REV. ARTHUR BROOKS 

RECTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE INCARNATION, NEW YORK 




NEW YORK 
THOMAS WHITTAKER 

2 AND 3 BIBLE HOUSE 
1887 



I \ 



\ 







Copyright, 1886, 
By THOMAS WHITTAKER. 



ELECTROTVPED AND PRINTED 

BY RAND AVERY COMPANY, 

BOSTON. 



TO THE 

MEMORY OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER 

I Dedicate 

Cfjis Folume of .Sermons. 



CONTENTS. 



SERMON PAGE 

I. The Unity of God's Work in Heaven and 

ON Earth . , i 

II. The Message of Christ to the Conscience . 15 

III. The Power of Christ's Words ... 30 

IV. God the Power of Man's Social Life . . 46 
V. Man's Power dependent upon his Knowl- 
edge OF God 61 

VI. Faith in God and in Christ .... 76 

VII. The Plain Life witnessing to Christ . . 90 

VIII. The Sifting of Life . . . . . . 105 

IX. Hopefulness through Christ . . . .119 

X. Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory . 139 

XI. Our Daily Bread 153 

XII. Gift and Purchase 168 

Xni. The Christian Rule of Life .... 182 

XIV. The Use of the Bible 196 

XV. The Use of Prayer 211 

XVI. Music and Religion 225 

XVII. Personal Religion and Missionary Effort . 238 

XVni. The Advent Message 254 

XIX. A Christmas Sermon 266 

XX. Christ's Flight into Egypt .... 279 

V 



VI 



Contents. 



SERMON 

XXI. The Work of Lent . . ' , 

XXII. The Suffering of Christ . 

XXIII. The Resurrection of Christ . 

XXIV. The Ascei^sion of Christ . 
XXV. The Knowledge of a Triune God 



294 
308 
321 
334 

347 



SERMONS. 



L 



THE UNITY OF GOD'S WORK IN 
HEAVEN AND ON EARTH. 

"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the water s^ 
and let it divide the waters from the waters^ — GENESIS i. 6. 

IT is not difficult to understand the conception 
which was in the mind of the writer of this 
verse. In it he ascribes to God that wonderful 
balance between the forces of earth and sky by 
which the two are kept from invading each other. 
The method by which God accomplishes this is 
the interposition of the solid expanse of heaven, by 
which the waters are separated from the waters, 
and the proper distinction of region carefully pre- 
served. It was a most natural conception for one 
who, in the dawn of knowledge, looked up and saw 
the blue vault of heaven above his head, with the 
stars shining as gems in its solid expanse. Such a 
conception gave confidence in the security of God's 



2 Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth, 

work ; and, provided that the idea of God as the 
Creator was present, the misconception could well 
be allowed to continue, until increased knowledge 
as to the methods of God's working in nature 
should dispel it. We know its falsity to-day, and 
the certainty of the absence of any such solid 
firmament only makes us wonder the more at the 
wisdom of the plan, by which the equilibrium is 
maintained between the earth and the sky. We 
know that the windows in heaven are not opened 
when the rain descends, and yet the gracious 
recurrence of wet and dry on the earth is as much 
as ever — nay, even more than ever — a token to 
us of the goodness and power of our Father who 
is in heaven. The oneness of the elements that 
compose earth and sky, the inter-action and con- 
nection between the waters above and the waters 
below, the unity of God's action, — those are the 
grounds of our admiration of creation to-day. The 
solid firmament dividing earth and heaven is gone, 
and God is more powerful and wonderful than ever 
in our eyes. 

The change which has thus been brought about 
in our conception of physical nature has had its 
counterpart in many directions. Once the Divine 
right of kings kept rulers on their throne : now it 
is necessary for that Divine right to vindicate itself 
by consideration for the good of the people who are 



Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on pMrth. 3 

governed, by appreciation of all the current influ- 
ences in the nation's or the world's life, by upright- 
ness of character and of intention. People and 
ruler are one in the elements of life, and the same 
laws apply to both ; there is no firmament of God's 
making between them, separating them into regions 
of laws peculiar to each. So as to the Church, 
We see that its Divine guidance consists not in 
laws or institutions given to it in the earliest days 
of its existence, and to be observed forever. But 
it changes from age to age ; it gathers to itself the 
best of human wisdom and experience, which, when 
consecrated to God, and filled with the Holy Spirit 
of God, is Divine assistance. It is not separated, in 
its nature and its powers, from the world around, 
for God is working in each. There is no firma- 
ment of infallibility marking off its waters from 
those of the rest of the world, and occasionally 
opening its windows to give refreshing showers. 
It is one with God's dispensations in all His deal- 
ings- with men. Nature and the material world 
around us, as it becomes the subject of poetry and 
of art, is seen to be more than dead matter. God 
speaks through it, and through its beauty and its 
laws, to the souls of men ; and the spiritual in man 
finds its food on the very fields off which the 
farmer has gathered his crop for the support of 
man's body. The hard and fast line between mind 



4 Unify of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth, 

and matter, which once seemed so fixed that the 
latter was pronounced wholly evil, is wiped out in 
the discernment of the voice of God throughout 
the action and the ruling of each. Doctrines which 
once were accepted as a discipline to faith sent 
down out of heaven, and having no relation to the 
ordinary thought of man, are now found to have 
points of warmest sympathy with the desires and 
aspirations of men, and, modified in form as many 
of them are, yield richer fruits of good living every 
day. So the conviction of the oneness between 
heaven and earth, between God's action in the 
lower and in the higher part of His kingdom, has 
grown. To trace all the process would be to review 
all the growth of man in every direction. That 
is the work which the historian and the philoso- 
pher are always doing. Our position as religious 
men asks that we shall understand that the mov- 
ing power of such action has been God's work in 
declaring the oneness between man and Himself; 
in making that fact known ; in patient inculcation 
of it, even to the extent of self-sacrifice. God has 
been in all this increasing tendency of thought. 
Often as the various dividing firmaments have been 
threatened, men have trembled and doubted very 
much, just as they doubted any possibility of keep- 
ing the waters of heaven and earth distinct without 
the dividing firmament of the Hebrew Scriptures. 



Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth. 5 

They knew not the power of God. Heaven must 
be separated from earth if it were still to be 
Heaven, and a source of refreshment and blessing ; 
God must not be near to man if He were still to 
be God and the Ruler of men. That was man's 
thought. And yet to let man feel and know His 
nearness and His kinship has been the very pur- 
pose of God, toward which His revelations were 
ever moving. All these other removals of the 
firmaments were but the side issues of that great 
stream of action which has been God's from the 
beginning. It culminated in the revelation of 
Jesus Christ. And if we do not understand what 
God has done for us in Christ in drawing us near 
to Himself, and in Himself drawing near to us, we 
shall misunderstand or misuse all the other parts 
of His work which are around us in life. We shall 
either be presumptuous, and think that our hand 
removed the firmament, and gained a victory over 
God, or we shall be mistrustful of the whole pro- 
cess, and seek by artificial laws and restrictions 
to restrain life to channels which it is ever out- 
growing and striving to destroy. The true God 
is the one who is ever near to us, seen in the 
working of all our lives, close to the desires of all 
our hearts ; and that is the God of revelation, the 
God of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in whom we are 
called to trust. 



6 Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earih. 

In the first place, we can see how such knowledge 
enlarges the idea of God's providence. We all be- 
lieve in such a thing, and feel sure that it embraces 
all that is good for us and for the world. God is 
working out His plans, and we have faith both in 
their character and their success. But what have 
they to do with us .'' We, too, have our plans, on a 
larger or a smaller scale according to our position 
in life. We want to be successful or comfortable, 
or we want to carry out some undertaking that shall 
give us a name, or improve our fellow-men. We 
see that men's actions and plans do affect God's 
work. A Napoleon or a Bismarck changes the map 
of Europe, and affects the relations of nations. A 
few adventurous spirits open up a continent for the 
extending race of man. On a smaller field the fool- 
ishness of a fanatic may cut off a valuable life, or 
any one of us may make or mar a life of impor- 
tance. But between this action of God and us a 
great firmament extends : there may be lights in 
it, or windows may open in it now and then. But 
who of us dares to claim that the same thoughts 
and desires move God in His plans and us in ours, 
just as we to-day know that the same laws regulate 
the deep blue of heaven and the dark mould of this 
earth ? It is just that confidence which is conferred 
upon men's lives and their work in Jesus Christ. 
We are not mere tools in the hand of a great 



Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth. 7 

Artificer ; there is not a merely mechanical coinci- 
dence between His works and ours, that makes a 
man's activity minister to God's glory. There is a 
motive of life given to us, the kingdom of God in 
Jesus Christ, which is at once His and ours. We 
labor to place our plans at Jesus' feet, to make 
them serve His purposes in the world, and then 
we are doing what God is doing also. We cannot 
see the end of that great line, at one extremity of 
which we are laboring ; we cannot pretend to know 
all that God intends to accomplish by the work of 
Christ : but we can see somewhat of that which 
He intends to do for us and for the world, and at 
that we can labor with Him with new courage and 
confidence and hope. When we pray, *'Thy king- 
dom come," if we understand what we pray, we are 
putting into all our work the very spirit and mo- 
tive by which God works. So one firmament of 
separation between God and us is removed by 
Jesus Christ. And as we reflect how much task- 
work and routine action is a necessary part of 
every man's life, scarcely any gift could seem more 
valuable for us. We do not have to wait for in- 
spiration and strength until the exceptional mo- 
m.ents come, when, as it were, out of an opening 
in the heaven light comes down upon us, in the 
memory and strength of which we live through 
the intervening darkness until the next visitation ; 



8 Unity of God's JVotk in Heaven and on Earth, 

but the same atmosphere of light which makes 
the heavens what they are is with us always. As 
St. John tells us, we are to walk in the light, as 
He is in the light. The lesser purposes of this 
present life differ not in kind, but only in degree, 
from those of some future life, when the knowledge 
of Christ and of His kingdom consecrates them. 
Nay, so great is the revelation of Christ, that, as 
the sons of God, we are even able to say that He 
and we are walking toward one great purpose, and 
are animated by one spirit. Let no man say, **It is 
my daily business, it is my engrossing care, that 
keeps me from knowing God." That very life of 
care, consecrated to the service of Christ, is the 
means of getting near to God. 

We pass from the thought of action to that of 
conduct. We all of us strive, with a certain 
amount of earnestness, to observe the laws of right, 
and to help the cause of good morals. We recog- 
nize their value to the world. Steadily, and by 
patient continuance from generation to generation, 
the necessity of sobriety, honesty, and purity in 
life has come to be recognized. The laws of life 
around us enforce this ; examples and warnings 
on every side press their lessons home upon us. 
There may be exceptions in the world, where the 
workings of other causes are to be discerned ; but 
we do confidently assert that character is, after all 



Unify of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth. 9 

is said, the truest key to success. This is the law 
of the world about us. But is it any thing more } 
Are these mere provincial arrangements of the world 
on this side of the firmament 1 And do we know 
any thing about the essential laws of action } If 
not, we can hardly wonder that the boldest and 
most adventurous spirits are often unwilling to be 
bound by what are mere prudential arrangements, 
and that they let the desires within them have full 
rein, and overleap these petty barriers. There can 
be no real love for righteousness until we see it as 
the law of the world, the very law of God's own 
nature, which shall last forever, and to which the 
greatest spirit may be proud to submit. Here, 
then, is a firmament, a separating barrier, between 
the action in heaven and the action on earth which 
Christ came to obliterate. When He came from 
heaven, the Son of God chose not the greatest or 
the most brilHant or the most successful life, but 
the best life. What the ordinary course of life 
here approves, the voluntary choice of God also 
approves. Heaven and earth, God and man, live 
by one law. The heart of man declares that that 
life which Jesus lived was the best and the most 
beautiful that the race of men here ever saw. We 
are no longer left in doubt as to what the eternal 
law of moral action is throughout all the universe 
of moral beino-s. At once the realm of character 



lo Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth. 

becomes infinitely exalted. It is a more dreadful 
and serious thing to transgress a law so fundamen- 
tal as that, than it is to cross some petty enact- 
ment that belongs to this mortal life only. It is a 
much greater thing to be good than it is to be any 
thing else. The other attainments of life shall 
pass ; Christ could afford to despise them all : 
but character, that was something which the Son 
of God was glad to claim as the result of His 
earthly life, and is something which in every life 
shall live forever. In all our efforts in that direc- 
tion we have before us life eternal. God may, and 
very probably has, worlds and spheres of being 
where possessions such as are akin to the sub- 
stance of this material world, will be utterly useless 
or even unknown ; but now we know that in all 
the realms of being, throughout the stretches of the 
universe, wherever God reigns, there is not a place 
where character is not of value, where righteous- 
ness is not the law of life. Now that the divid- 
ing firmament which shut away earth from heaven 
is gone, there is meaning of transcendent signifi- 
cance to those words, *' Lay not up for yourselves 
treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth 
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal : 
but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, 
where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and 
where thieves do not break through nor steal." 



Unify of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth, ii 

The language is not merely figurative. We know 
what the heavenly treasures are : they are those 
same treasures of righteousness which are so valu- 
able on earth. And if, by our birth, our training, 
our education, our circumstances, God has given 
us upright character, we must not let it remain a 
mere earthly attainment, making life more regular 
and comfortable, and conscience more easy. We 
must see the loftier €ide of uprightness. We must 
lay that possession of character at Christ's feet. 
We must ask Him to lead us to the knowledge of 
God, our Father and His. We must look upon 
this gift as one belonging to us as immortal souls, 
and not merely as men who value the respect of 
our fellow-men. We must take Jesus not merely 
as an example, but as a leader, who opens to us 
the way of eternal life, and who tells us the value 
of that jewel, character, which we possess, as the 
weak, short-sighted knowledge of earthly men can 
never do. 

I can deal more hastily with one or two farther 
examples of the way in which Christ has opened 
heaven to us. There is in all of us the need for 
sympathy and comfort ; in our happiness we de- 
mand the one, in our sorrow we ask the other. 
Our brethren in the world give what they can at 
times, but we want to know that it is not a mere 
earthly arrangement by which we thus crave com- 



12 Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth. 

panionship and love. At times the world of 
nature seems to speak in sympathy with our feel- 
ings ; and then again it is sadly contradictory, and 
we seem shut up to the narrower range of human 
knowledge. But when Christ announces the love 
of God, when He proves it, and manifests it by His 
sacrifice of Himself for us, then the old idea of 
a harsh, cruel, and unsympathizing God has disap- 
peared. That love is unfathomable, as the blue of 
the firmament over our heads ; but it is an expanse, 
not a solid barrier, shutting away the waters below 
from the waters above. We learn that wherever 
the vilest sinner goes, there God's love goes, and 
endeavors to bring him back. Whether our need of 
comfort comes from sin or from suffering, whether 
the cry for sympathy comes from despair or from 
grief, God's love is a reality which rules alike in 
heaven and on earth. Since it found the way to man- 
ifest itself once, we are sure that it can manifest it- 
self again. If it could take flesh and suffer for us, 
it surely can take to itself the wings of the Spirit, 
and visit our hearts with that message of salvation 
which we all need. How well we understand, in 
these days, that if that picture of a solid firmament 
had been the true one, the earth would have been 
shut away from its truest sources of strength and 
of refreshment ! It needed not to be shut up to 
itself, but to be part of God's great universe, for 



Unify of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth. 13 

safety and for health. So shut up to himself, away 
from his God, man must perish. He needs the 
free access of God's love to lead him upward, just 
as he needs the possession of the love of his fellow- 
man to protect and to keep him here. It is the same 
love, and it is as surely an element of life between 
God and us, as it is between us and our brother. 

And as to our difficulties, how many of them 
arise from our looking upon ourselves as connected 
with this earth alone, shut away from our God by 
some impassable barrier ! '* If a man die, shall he 
live again "^ " How can I ever answer that until 
I know that I have a share in the eternal life of 
God ! that He cares for my life enough to give Him- 
self for it ? Then, in contrast with men's guesses 
are Christ's words, " Because I live, ye shall live 
also;" "I am the resurrection and the life;" ''Who- 
soever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." 
When the conditions of life are drawn, not from 
this earth only, but from heaven likewise, I cannot 
fasten to this bodily existence the life of the soul. 
It is so with all the other questions of the soul, to 
which there is no answer as long as that soul is con- 
fined to this earth, and shut out from the knowledge 
of that heaven to which it belongs. Christ brings 
that knowledge, and dark questions receive from 
Him a light which none other can give. 

When in the Book of the Revelation we read. 



14 Unity of God's Work in Heaven and on Earth, 

** I saw a new heaven and a new earth : for the first 
heaven and the first earth were passed away," can 
we not feel that we are hearing, not only of that 
last end of this earthly universe, but of that con- 
tinual process by which the old heavens and the 
old earth, under the influence of Christ and of His 
Gospel, are giving way before a conception of life 
now in the presence of God, to be completed here- 
after ? Are we living such a life now, or are we 
holding to the old narrow conception of an earthly 
existence, without any knowledge of our God ? The 
very ideas of modern science and thought, which 
have done away with distinctions once thought to 
be fixed and impassable, tell us of the influence of 
our Master's work. But we stand at the very cen- 
tre of that movement. Our science must not sur- 
pass our religion in reasonableness and strength 
and breadth. It cannot do so if we appreciate the 
true meaning of the presence of Jesus Christ. In 
the knowledge of a Divine Saviour moving and 
inspiring us in our earthly work, we are to feel 
heaven and earth coming together. As they were 
one in Him, they are to be one in us. Take life 
with all its duties ; drink of the waters that are 
opened for us here, but drink of them only as a 
part of that Water of Life which, given to us from 
heaven, tells us that men have no right and no 
strength in any other refreshment than that which 
comes from the presence of God. 



II. 



THE MESSAGE OF CHRIST TO THE 
CONSCIENCE. 

"For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and 
knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then 
have we co7zfidence toward God.'''' — i John iii. 20, 21. 

THIS feeling of our heart, which St. John men- 
tions here, is evidently what we call the voice 
of conscience. There is something very signifi- 
cant in the easy and natural way in which it is 
referred to here. It is taken for granted as a 
power which exists in man, and to which attention 
must therefore be given ; to cultivate it rightly, to 
be able to understand and to use it, is evidently con- 
sidered to be an object at which all religion aims. 
We all grant the existence of a conscience : we have 
felt it too often within us, not to know what is 
meant by its name. It breaks forth in characters 
where it seems as if it would have long ago been 
too much discouraged ever to enter its protest 
again. We reserve, as the last most condemnatory 
description of a man, the statement that he seems 
to have no conscience. Conscience involves not 

15 



1 6 The Message of Christ to the Conscience, 

only a power of recognizing what is good or evil, 
but it also comprises that strange, uneasy feeling, 
which we cannot shake off, which comes over us 
when we are more or less conscious that we have 
violated the laws relating to good and evil. It is the 
witness which man carries within him that he is a 
moral being, bound to do not only what is pleasant, 
what is convenient, what is useful or profitable, but 
what is right. No matter where that idea of what 
is right came from, when in the heart of man it 
is recognized as right, it is because of the power 
of the conscience. It is a mysterious but valuable 
possession. We cannot locate it any more than 
we can locate the possession of life. It is a mode 
of thought that makes man's mind differ from 
the mind of all other creatures ; and we dread the 
loss of it, because by that the man's moral power 
seems hopelessly maimed, and his moral position 
lost. We cannot appeal to him or deal with him 
as a man. And yet this important and elevated 
power receives strangely little culture and encour- 
agement fKom our action and thought. The other 
parts of life are disciplined and trained, the objects 
that they desire are put before them, the reasons 
and modes of their working are studied and com- 
prehended, their culture and growth are watched 
with anxiety, the dangers to which they are ex- 
posed are carefully avoided. Conscience asks for 



The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 17 

duty and the elevation of duty, and we hardly 
know what to give it. ]\Iost significant, then, is 
the way in which St. John, when he is dwelling 
on the love and service of God, turns and lays 
that before the conscience. He does it as natu- 
rally as we give food to the body, and wisdom to 
the mind. That power which the common course 
of life has to let drift uncared for and neglected, 
he turns to at once as the very one for which he 
has a word. He shows that there is hope for our 
most important faculty if we will only let religion 
have its true power in our lives. He does not 
argue that there ought to be such a thing as con- 
science : he supposes all men to admit that. He 
does not wait to prove that religion speaks to the 
conscience; but he goes right on to show what 
it says to it, and how it helps it. The religion 
which is full of the love of God needs a conscience 
to which it can speak. That is its field of action. 
Without it, it can no nothing. It says to men, 
" Give me just what you find it hardest to dispose 
of otherwise, and I will be satisfied." Try to make 
religion play its part merely on our bodies or our 
minds, and it becomes a thing of ceremonies or 
of doctrines. Try to make it play its part on our 
feelings merely, and it becomes a thing of senti- 
ment. The religious man must be one whose 
conscience is ever active with the strong sense of 



1 8 The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 

duty that has been given it, and is ever clear as to 
the source of duty with the sight of God that has 
been revealed to it. There is a field in religion for 
every faculty of man to exercise itself fully ; but it 
starts with the man just where every other source 
of power has nothing to give, — with the con- 
science. It makes the moral sense a reality as it 
dwells with vigor on those two great ideas of man's 
sin and his power of belonging to God. Those 
are the two things which the conscience whispers 
blindly : " You are not good, and you ought to be 
better." Those are the two things which religion 
says in still clearer, more definite, and more practi- 
cal tones : "You are a sinner, and you ought to be 
God's child." The poor, stifled voice of conscience 
hears this hopeful response to words which it has 
been trying to make heard amid sounds which 
drowned them. It feels that it is no longer alone; 
it looks up, and is saved. How much better our 
lives would be if this close relation between the 
conscience and religion were ever clear ! Religious 
men would day after day get better and deeper 
knowledge of their duty. Conscientious men 
would find that this guide that they were blindly 
reverencing and yet despairingly following was not 
a poor, lonely stranger from a better land, but 
was the very voice of God leading them naturally 
and easily on to their heavenly Father. 



The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 19 

But so great a power as conscience is not to be 
dealt with lightly or easily. St. John not only 
recognizes and encourages conscience, but he tells 
us how we are to deal with it. Sometimes our 
conscience accuses us, and tells us that we have 
done wrong. We all know that feeling, and it is 
one in which we can never delight. The wrong- 
doing of which we are conscious separates us 
from our best ideas of life ; we are ashamed of 
ourselves. It separates us from others who may 
know, or who, we think, may know, our secret. 
The accusation of others is not nearly as hard to 
bear as the accusation from within, for the latter 
we cannot deny : we ourselves are the witnesses 
to its truth. We cannot palliate it : it is brought 
home to us in all its force. It is within us, where 
thought is most active, where feeling is most sensi- 
tive. Such moments of a guilty conscience must, 
then, be among the deepest and most important of 
our lives. We dread them so much that we try 
to forget them in the past and to avoid them 
in the future. How do we deal with them when 
they are present.'* How often this stirring of 
conscience leads only to an attempt to quiet it ! 
The feeling is so unbearable that we strive at 
once to apply the remedy at just the point where 
the pain is felt. We flee to some act^ of repara- 
tion, some word of apology, some deed of j^enance, 



20 The Message of Christ to the Conscience, 

which shall quiet the conscience, and ease our 
pain. The very intenseness of our feelings leads 
to a superficial cure; our own feelings are upper- 
most in the intensity of our self-accusation, and 
we think of our own immediate position alone as 
we strive to free ourselves from the weight of a 
condemning conscience. There seems to be no 
time for largeness of thought or breadth of action. 
The one thought is, Get rid of this burden. Per- 
haps we rush from one fault to another. Some 
neglect of a suffering brother makes us thought- 
lessly lavish in acts of benevolence ; some undue 
assertion cf power makes us lax in standing up 
for what we know to be right ; some carelessness 
in belief makes us blindly superstitious. I have 
heard a man of prominence, whose character, train- 
ing, and position made him inclined to underrate 
the importance of all purely moral considerations, 
declare that he had found conscientious men the 
most unsatisfactory to deal with, and the least to 
be relied upon. To his mind, looking without 
sympathy, as a critical spectator, they were always 
one-sided. They were so careful about some one 
point, with regard to which they felt a special fear, 
that they neglected many others where evil could 
easily be done. Surely we can all appreciate in 
ourselves the power of such a criticism, as we re- 
member how often some sad failure, of which con- 



The Message of Christ to the Conscience, 21 

science has accused us, has led to the putting of a 
patch on our moral garment in that one particular 
place, until at length the process, oft repeated, has 
led to our appearance among men, clothed, indeed, 
— covered over with marks of moral carefulness, — 
but unattractive, and ashamed of the very results of 
God's training of us as men with consciences. Now 
turn to St. John's mode of dealing with an accusing 
conscience, and see how true a remedy it contains 
for these dangers. " If our hearts condemn us, God 
is greater than our hearts, and knoweth all things." 
That is to be the thought of a man filled with the 
love of God. Instead of pointing out one little 
fault, the accusation of conscience is to open a 
sight into all the possibility of sin ; instead of 
shutting us up to the thought of ourselves, it is to 
lead us up to the thought of God. There is surely 
no tampering with conscience there, no silencing 
of its voice. We are made to see more than ever 
the heinousness of sin ; but it is seen in the light 
of God's searching judgments, not of our excited 
feelings. We see the one thing that has touched 
our conscience as a part of the great sin of all life, 
departure from God ; and to Him we betake our- 
selves more closely than ever before. We learn 
to be watchful at every point ; we put all our char- 
acter and all our action into God's keeping. Our 
new resolutions and efforts take in not only the 



22 The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 

correction of that one failure, but the remedy of 
all those failings, known only to God, of which our 
conscientious self-reproaches are but indications. 
We rise broader and better men from our discom- 
fiture, for it has told us of God. Our conscientious 
troubles have not been the opening of a door 
which lets in an uncomfortable draft upon us, and 
which we close again as soon as possible ; but it 
has been the opening of a door into the larger, 
freer air of God's love and discipline. The first 
breath has struck us uncomfortably, accustomed as 
we were to our more confined and corrupt atmos- 
phere ; but we arise and go out through this door, 
and are made better and stronsrer men in all our 
action. When we come in contact with moral ques- 
tions, when our conscience, which is our possession 
as moral beings, is stirred, we are dealing with 
things in which wc demand the thought and help 
of God. The world did not cause the questions, 
and cannot solve them ; we of ourselves cannot do 
the work, for the .questions speak of us in our rela- 
tion to Him. But we must knov/ God in order to 
deal rightly with our stirred consciences, — know 
Him in His love, in His true position as our Father, 
as He has showed Himself to us in Christ, calling 
us, forgiving us, providing the way for our salva- 
tion. Then we can rise, and be bold to put down 
the disturbing visitor in our heart. With a wisdom 



The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 23 

large and comprehensive, because it is the wisdom 
of God, we can remedy our failing, make reparation 
for our sin, cleanse our conscience, rise to a better 
life. Our knowledge of our sin will be lost in God's 
deeper knowledge of it, as He, "greater than our 
heart," knoweth all things ; and we shall find com- 
fort and strength in adding, as Peter did after his 
sin of denial, " Lord, Thou knowest all things ; 
Thou knowest that I love thee." 

So St. John shows the love of God as dealing 
w^ith a troubled conscience. Now turn to the con- 
science in the other state, when it is not troubled, 
the quiet, easy conscience. There are such times 
in life, times when no sins seem . to come within 
the limits of our consciousness to harass our minds. 
We do not doubt that we are sinners, but the 
course of life does not at such moments bring our 
sins vividly home to us. We are apt to distrust 
such times, and either to try to stir our conscience 
by dwelling on our sins, or to reproach ourselves 
that we are not doing better with our lives, and 
using them to more purpose. The first develops 
a disagreeable and morbid self-consciousness ; the 
latter distrusts all God's dealing with us, and makes 
us inclined to think that He is only fitfully with us. 
Surely there must be moments of quiet and rest 
needed for our moral life, just as the growing and 
strengthening child needs the hours of sleep for his 



24 The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 

development. And so we rejoice to hear St. John's 
supposed case : " Beloved, if our heart condemn 
us not." It tells us to be confident in God at all 
times. It tells us to have deeper signs of moral 
health than morbidness of feeling or fussiness of 
character. It tells us that there is no more need 
of always stirring up our consciences in order to 
convince ourselves that we are Christians, than 
there is for a mother to wake up her peacefully 
sleeping child in order to assure herself that he is 
well. And yet we know the dangers of a quiet 
conscience too well not to look deeply, and see St. 
John's provision against them. It is so easy to be 
satisfied, to feel that moments of quiet are certifi- 
cates of exemption from all moral exertion, to en- 
joy our ease, and be careless, that we rightly dread 
the after-effect of such times in our life. They 
seem to result in a retrograding in all our moral 
culture, as conceit and sloth take possession of our 
contented souls. We come out of them with all 
our watchfulness relaxed, and with all our strength 
gone. We are often wakened from them by finding 
ourselves in some terrible sin. And the reason 
surely is, that to us such moments seem the end, 
and not the beginning, of moral paths. To us they 
recommend themselves because of their own pleas- 
ure; they are to be enjoyed for their own sake. But 
to St. John they are attractive as opening another 



The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 25 

and a delightful mode of approach to God, who 
Himself is the only end of moral attainment. "Be- 
loved, if our hearts condemn us not, then have we 
confidence toward God." It is a time when we can 
approach God in that spirit of loving confidence in 
which we can learn most of Him. We are untrou- 
bled at such moments, and our minds are free to 
dwell on Him, on His power and His love. We 
approach our great Father in the way in which the 
child who has been faithful and good draws near to 
his parent, — ready to take his hand and enter his 
confidence ; not arrogating equality, but simply en- 
tering into that relation which the father loves to 
have him assume. God, in the view of St. John's 
Gospel, is not a God to be sought only in time of 
sin or of trouble. He is one who is able to give 
more than forgiveness in sin, or succor in trouble. 
He is one able to give something better than either 
of those, — sympathy and ready love ; able to make 
us grow up, by the sweetest natural processes of 
life, into men after the likeness of our heavenly 
Father. He works in sunshine as well as in storm, 
in development as well as in creation, in peace as 
well as in war, in the still, small voice more than in 
the whirlwind. If we have a faith in such a God, if 
we see Him as John did in Jesus Christ, then most 
gladly we shall welcome every moment of quiet as 
a time that tells us, not of ourselves, but of Him ; 



26 The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 

not of our goodness, but of His kindness ; not of 
our rest, but of His activity. This quiet, if it is 
a worthy one, came not from ourselves. The cir- 
cumstances of Hfe that have shielded us from 
storms of sin, the knowledge of a Gospel which 
has been the forming power of our life, the pres- 
ence of a Spirit that has breathed peace to our 
souls, — all these have been His gift. With greater 
confidence we approach Him. Now through that 
open door of conscience comes the warm sunshine, 
not making us drowsy, careless, and slothful, but 
inviting us to go out into the presence of our God, 
from whom it comes, and to enjoy it and use it, to 
make us stronger men. We store up strength in 
such moments. We ask and receive with deeper 
faith, because through all our petitions runs that 
tone of confidence and of nearness to our God. 
The resting conscience is to be alive, not dead ; 
gaining strength like a resting man, sure that the 
time of action, hard and strenuous, is yet to come, 
when all will be needed in the emergencies of ac- 
tion. It will wake soon enough ; we need not stir 
it artificially, or begrudge it its quiet, if we only 
see that quiet as the gift which makes us confident 
in God. There is no intermission to its action ; but 
always, if used in the faith of Christ, it is pointing 
to its true object, God. 

Conscience is a great blessing. It is not a dis- 



• The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 27 

tress, to be disposed of as soon as possible. It is 
not the pain of a diseased moral nature. It is our 
noblest faculty ; it belongs to us most naturally. 
Is there any thing worse in this world than mis- 
taking a friend for an enemy .'' We lose what is 
our greatest strength, we gain what is our great- 
est curse. We have the battle with the supposed 
enemy ; and we are without the very means of con- 
ducting it, for he who should be our friend and 
helper is not by our side. It is because of this 
that suspicion poisons many a life, and makes it a 
failure from beginning to end. Every thing in that 
life is weak by a continual mistake. And when 
the same mistake takes possession of us, as we look 
at ourselves and our moral equipment for life's 
work, will it not be still more fatal .-* How we fight 
against our conscience, dread its frowns and dis- 
trust its smiles, and act as if it were a faculty 
meant to harass us, and often determined to de- 
ceive us ! It cannot be. If such had been the case, 
it would have killed man long ago with its persecu- 
tions and delusions, or man would have deservedly 
killed it, and put it out of his nature, for its constant 
and unnatural harassings. But conscience is as 
strong as it ever was, still conducts itself as impe- 
riously, and sometimes contradictorily; and each 
'man still fisfhts with his conscience the battle that 
has been humanity's from the beginning. Are we 



28 The Message of Christ to the Conscience, 

not making a mistake, and taking that for our 
enemy which is our friend ? And is not that mis- 
take part of the still greater one which makes us 
think that God is the enemy, the hard taskmaster, 
of us all ? Never will conscience be what it should 
be to us until He who gave it stands out before us 
in His true light. So Jesus is the only leader and 
guide to the conscience ; He alone makes it what 
it should be to us, and harmonizes all its words 
and actions. Other things provoke it : all life 
stirs its words of right and wrong ; you hear them 
every day. But that never can make us really con- 
scientious men. Only He who tells us of the near- 
ness and love of God, holds Him up to us as a lov- 
ing, forgiving, disciplining, and perfecting Father, — 
only He can tell us how to use rightly this greatest 
of gifts, the conscience. In Him all its words shall 
be harmonized ; it shall be our sweetest companion 
by night and day, in winter and summer, in work 
and in play. We shall never want to lose it, as we 
listen eagerly for its slightest word ; and men shall 
learn not only to respect it, but to love it as they 
see it in our action. Poor, maltreated friend ! it 
shall begin to be appreciated by us, as it does its 
true work of leading us at all times nearer to the 
God whom Christ has taught us to love. His 
Spirit shall inspire its wisdom ; His redemption 
shall take the sting from its rebukes; His love shall 



The Message of Christ to the Conscience. 29 

make profitable and pleasant its soothing words. 
The growth of the conscientious and the Christian 
life must ever keep pace, for they are one and the 
same. To be a Christian is to be a truly conscien- 
tious man. The conscience within us, which none 
of us ought ever to desire to silence, calls out for 
the Saviour Christ ; and we must not deny it, for it 
can live only by the love of God, 



III. 

THE POWER OF CHRIST'S WORDS. 

" The officers aits7vered, Never man s^paJce like tnis man.'''' — ^JOHN 
vii. 46. 

WE are not allowed in the Bible to think that 
the reception of Christ by those to whom 
He presented Himself was always quick or deci- 
sive. Processes of thought and of conviction are 
displayed, and objections are answered according to 
their nature. Disciples are seen gradually maturing 
in their degree of certainty, and every variety of 
motive and reasoning contributes toward the result. 
St. John, who of the apostles seems to have been 
most conversant with the current thought of the 
time, shows us on more than one occasion the gen- 
eral fermentation of thought which Christ's appear- 
ance and position caused in that Jewish community, 
and specifies different considerations which influ- 
enced the "decision of the various groups of men 
which came in contact with Him. As our minds 
are alive to these various instances, constantly 
appearing in the condensed statements of the Gos- 
pels, they give to the teachings of those Gospels 

30 



The Poiver of Chn's/'s Words. 31 

an intensely human aspect. We see, that, though 
the truth is Divine, it will not reject the ordinary 
channels of approach to the human mind ; it will 
utilize them all according to their existence and 
condition in the various classes of men. All men 
— and, since men differ according to the times in 
which they live, all ages — will not be approached 
in the same way ; and yet, as all men are approach- 
able on some side of desire or reason, this swiftly 
moving religion, which is depicted as appealing to 
so many men, and as strong in so many ways, will 
have an appropriate means of approach to all, so 
that none may escape its blessings if they really 
wish them. That path of approach is to be dis- 
covered, not by unnatural departures from ordinary 
life, but by the right use of all the tendencies 
which give to each man and to each generation 
its peculiar character. Christ, as the Gospels 
represent Him, is at the centre of human life. It 
is useless, it is vain, to leave any point of human 
life and to go to another in hopes of getting nearer 
to Him; for straight from Him to every point 
there is a direct line, down which the ready soul 
may look, up which the ready saving power will 
move. 

One of these paths of approach is stated in our 
text; and it is such a human one, and has so 
much affinity for men of our times, that we can 



2,2 The Power of Christ's Words. 

with profit learn more of it. Certain officers, sent 
from the chief priests and Pharisees to arrest 
Christ, heard the words of Christ, and were so im- 
pressed by them that they returned without accom- 
pHshing their purpose. Those words disarmed 
their opposition, and apparently opened the way 
for a better feeling in their hearts toward Christ, 
which may or may not have been followed out by 
those men to a result of perfect belief. It was a 
method of conviction which agrees very largely 
with all that we know of God's ordinary modes of 
working among men. No voice from heaven 
startled those officers with words of attestation, 
no miracles appealed to their sense of wonder or 
desire for benefit, no blinding vision made them 
feel their own insignificance and worthlessness. 
It was a much simpler and nobler method than 
either of these which was used : as men listening 
to a fellow-man, they found the spell growing 
stronger and stronger ; words such as they had 
never heard before, gradually brought the convic- 
tion of a power above that of all other men, until 
at last the thought of opposition to such a charac- 
ter seemed irreverence, and the conception of their 
ability to injure or even to fetter such a man 
seemed folly. 

If the words of Jesus had such an effect at that 
time over men full of hostility, and armed with power 



The Power cf Christ's Words. 33 

to exert it, we may well believe that they are 
equally powerful to-day. Where what appear like 
more supernatural forces cannot enter, this mode 
of appeal can have an effectiveness, which we need 
never distrust. For the power of living thoughts 
and words is greater in the world to-day than ever 
before. The changes of circumstances, through 
which the world has passed so rapidly since Christ 
came, have made the material surroundings and 
actions of past ages almost unimaginable to us. 
And yet from those ages, both in religious and in 
secular history, the words of great men live among 
us with all the power of their original utterance. 
The man who spoke them is a reality, even though 
the times in which He lived have long ago disap- 
peared. There is a supernatural power to words 
that is strangely pervasive ; they pass from age 
to age and from country to country. They know 
no limits of climate or of race ; the human heart 
recognizes their power, no matter where it beats, 
or how it is clothed. The religion of Christ, in- 
tended for all times, received its most potent 
earthly instrument in the spoken words of its 
Founder ; by those it was sure of perpetuity and 
of diffusion. Going into times when miracles had 
ceased, and visions were treated as the vaga- 
ries of a disordered brain, they would carry that 
wdiich all men would appreciate ; they would be 



34 The Power of Christ's Words. 

the gate of approach to a deeper study, a fuller 
comprehension^ and a maturer faith in the great 
IMaster. The embodiment of His power in His 
words was a prophetic look by Christ into the 
times to come. Institutions would change ; tem- 
ples would decay ; the very face of nature would 
not remain the same. The living thing from 
those days, sent forward into the times of univer- 
sal literature which were to come, was to be the 
words of Christ. They would not be bound to 
the soil, accessible to a few travellers alone ; they 
would not be wrapped up in antiquities, known 
only to scholars. They would be carried into con- 
nection with individual lives ; they could be treas- 
ured in the homes and the hearts of every man 
and of every class. Still more, to exalt the func- 
tion of words was to give value and currency to 
a universal coin in which every man's purse 
abounded ; it was to make the possibility of follow- 
ing in the line of the Master's work the possession 
of every man to whom breath had been given. It 
stamped Christianity as the gospel of humanity, 
calling out the power, and intensifying the respon- 
sibility, of every human soul. 

All these aspects of that method of conviction, 
which God employed with those officers of the 
Pharisees, have great significance to-day. Despite 
the material researches and speculations of these 



The Pcwer of Christ's Words. 35 

times, they are times in which spiritual force, as it 
passes from age to age and from country to coun- 
try, is more evident than ever before. The prog- 
ress of learning and the growth of mutual 
intercourse have given the spiritual power in man 
an audience which knows no limits of time or 
place. Amid all these voices which come to us 
from every side, the words of Jesus of Naza- 
reth are more prominent than ever. The expres- 
sion of a band of Jewish officers, with their 
probably slight acquaintance with literature or ora- 
tors, was . merely a strong statement : " Never 
man spake like this man." To-day it has a literal 
meaning. No words have touched so many hearts ; 
none have appeared so wonderful in their simpli- 
city and their depth ; none have been found to be 
so free from petty prejudice, and so tender of 
every feeling of the human heart ; none have 
stood, as they have, the ever-renewed comparison 
with each successive generation of writers ; none 
have been able to endure so calmly amidst all mis- 
interpretations alike of enemies and of friends ; 
none have revealed such new resources of meaning, 
as new emergencies have driven men to them for 
help. These are facts which each new race of 
critics makes stronger ; they are facts which, in 
their historical reality, appeal to men living in a 
world of realities, which, in their spiritual signifi- 



The Pcwer of Christ's Words. 



cance, speak to the richest sensibilities of the 
human soul. The words of Christ are a test of 
earnestness. Does a man want the best in life, 
the most thoroughly tested sources of wisdom, the 
words Avhich all, from different points of view, unite 
in praising, then he must make himself acquainted 
with the words of Jesus ; he must study them 
more thoroughly than any others ; he must never 
let them go until he has an understanding of their 
wonderful power. No sneers at a book religion, 
no indignation at the inferences which others have 
drawn from those words, absolve from that duty. 
In the midst of the greatest confusion of mind or 
difficulties of soul, here is an ultimate duty on 
which a man can rest, one which comes to him 
indorsed by all the best analogies of life and 
authority of experience. When the history seems 
traditional, and the doctrine enigmatical, still the 
clearness of that light from Christ's own v/ords 
stands forth. If the field is narrowed, what 
remains becomes all the more wonderful and im- 
perative. Lives which have been severed in other 
sympathies, can meet there, and, under the leader- 
ship of the one Master, strive to find the way to- 
gether into the perfect light. To-day more than 
ever the words of Christ ought to be in the hands 
and the minds and the hearts of all men. 

The power of Christ's words lies in their morality 



The Power of Christ's Words. 37 

and their authority. To those messengers of the 
Pharisees who had been brought up under the law, 
the idea of a living authority was perhaps the 
more striking feature of Christ's teaching, as we 
are told that the people wondered at Him, "for He 
taught them as one having authority, and not as 
the scribes." But Christ's statement of the laws 
of conduct, and His inculcation of righteousness, 
were also very different from any thing to which 
they had been accustomed. He never repeated 
one of the old, familiar commandments without 
going back to its very foundation, and showing 
that its form was nothing, and that its spirit was 
every thing. He laid down no new command- 
ments, entered into no detail of action, prescribed 
no new ordinances. Men were to be ricrhteous 
with a perfection of which scribes and Pharisees 
had never dreamed, but it was to be the perfection 
of their Father in heaven. His enemies were puz- 
zled ; something was new in these words, and yet 
not a word of disrespect was spoken of the old law. 
They could find nothing of which to lay hold as a 
cause of accusation either to priest or to governor, 
and yet there seemed to be a hostility to all estab- 
lished systems of teaching. The people rejoiced at 
a liberty of teaching which they only partially com- 
prehended, and the officers wondered at a wisdom 
different from all which they had ever heard before. 



38 -The Power cf Christ's Words. 

All classes were thus affected by this fundamental 
element of the moral teaching of Christ ; and yet 
it was something which Judaism, the system of 
prescription, could never appreciate or embody. 
But it made Christ's words glorious with a light 
which can never die, and which must ever surpass 
all others. As He, speaking of the Father and 
revealing the Father, traced every duty to relation 
to Him, He was erecting the only standard of right- 
eousness which was to be practicable or reasona- 
ble in the time of the world's manhood, which He 
opened. The moral life of these present times 
has a hard weight to bear. The rapid changes of 
view to which men's minds are subjected, the 
wide survey of times and of nations which is 
opened to them, the fall of prescribed modes of 
action, the constant demand for new expedients, — 
all these tend to shake the foundations cf duty, 
and to make the man, with his desires, a law unto 
himself. The failure to find on many subjects 
rules that shall be equally binding on all men and 
under all conditions, gives rise to the feeling that 
there are no ultimate rules of life, and that all 
action is a mere thing of expediency. And under 
such difficulties the wonderful side of Christ's 
teaching comes out more powerfully than ever, as 
He brings service and relation to God into sight as 
a law for every man's life, as the power v.'hich 



Tl:e Poiivr of Christ's Words. 39 

made strong religions of prescribed laws and ordi- 
nances, but which is all the more necessary and 
evident under the freedom of modern life. Each 
duty is sacred, and all duty is holy. Under God's 
leading there must be progress, but at each step of 
that progress the voice of the Father is as impera- 
tive as at any other. In a world full of God's 
children in every stage of growth and of privilege, 
there will be a variety of standards and of duties ; 
but each man by the words of Christ is called to 
hang his duty on the great commandment of love 
to God, where it shall be strong and firm. Christ 
said of His own words, *' They are spirit and they 
are truth ; " and so they have proved to be. They 

m 

have given the living spirit to action, the form of 
which has long passed away; they have j^ut men in 
sympathy with truth, even though their particular 
view of it has been distorted and false. None but 
a great authority on moral action, standing outside 
of and above the action of ordinary men, could 
thus have given a law of action which cannot be 
broken, one the need and meaning of which the 
world did not appreciate as He first spoke it, but 
which it has been learning more heartily ever 
since. What Christ said at the well near Samaria 
may be said alike of all systems of religion with 
prescribed duties and ceremonies, of all codes of 
action which the successive Christian generations 



40 The Power of Christ's Words. 

have laid down, of all expedients of organization 
and reformation in civil and social life which are 
offered to the ills of suffering humanity : " Who- 
soever drinketh of this water shall thirst again." 
Over and over again the processes of such systems 
will have to be repeated. We need say no more to 
rebuke or to check them than Christ would have said 
to those Samaritans to prevent them from coming 
to that well with their buckets for the water which 
should supply and refresh all their daily life. But, 
like Him, we can add of Him and of His truth, 
" Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give 
him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall 
give him shall be in him a well of water springing 
up into everlasting life." He is a spring of moral 
power that never fails. If men leave Him, if His 
words are neglected, it is because the sources of 
life are not wanted ; because temporary expedients 
are overvalued ; because the present, with its 
methods, occupies the whole range of vision ; be- 
cause we are back with the Jews of the first cen- 
tury, and do not stand with the Christ of every 
century. One word of His, lifting the whole 
range of duty, placing each man in the presence 
of God, His Father, rightly heard with wilKng heart, 
must make men exclaim, *^ Never man spake like 
this man." 

The personal element in Christ's words is as 



The Pciver cf Christ's Words. 41 

striking and valuable to us to-day as it was to men 
of those times. When scribes taught as having no 
authority, as simply the transmitters of the words 
of the past, as the collators or interpreters of laws 
which had been given long before, they were lost 
in a system which had no place for the living 
soul of the man himself. In such a system that 
living soul was not necessary ; it was an intrusion. 
And when Christ spoke to men with a tone of au- 
thority, the people heard Him gladly ; not only be- 
cause that tone revealed His power to them, but 
also because it revealed them to themselves ; they 
felt no longer like parts of a great legal national 
machine, but like the men who, first hearing the 
law from Moses, had been incited to go on and 
found the new Israelitish nation. Wherever 
Christ's words have gone, declaring His power and 
supremacy, calling men to Himself with an author- 
ity and confidence which is unlimited, the sound of 
such a voice has awakened the soul of man to a 
new recognition of itself. This is the message that 
it would speak to men to-day. The great extension 
of the study of nature, the wide views of the system 
of natural laws, has made it necessary. The very 
mind that has studied, and the very soul that has 
appreciated, those laws, has lost sight of itself un- 
der the magnitude of its new discovery. The ma- 
terial forces of life have seemed to be every thing. 



42 The Power of Christ's Words. 

and the living soul of man has been pushed aside 
as one of the factors in the problem of human life. 
What has gone on in philosophy has reflected itself 
in practical life. The path of success has seemed 
to lie in the larger control of material substance, 
which all the discoveries of a modern time have 
made possible. Men who have found that path 
assert their power brutally, in accordance with the 
nature of that on which they pride themselves ; men 
who have failed to find it are discouraged at the sight 
of the forces that are arrayed against them, or strive 
to seize for themselves what they think constitutes 
the true source of power. The personal word of 
Christ is a very strong one to such a state of affairs. 
The simple peasant form, without advantages of 
inherited or ecclesiastical position, with none of 
this world's power or wealth in His hands, saying, 
"Come unto me," promising crowns and thrones 
to His followers, telling of His near relation to the 
Father and of His future glory, looking back to 
days before Abraham, and forward to times beyond 
the destruction of the heavens and the earth, pla- 
cing Himself above Solomon, and making Himself 
greater than Moses and the prophets, — that is a 
figure which gives just the lesson of our times. Tt 
adds consistency to His words. His constant pro- 
tests against the things of this world, and His warn- 
ings to the rich, are the call to seek and to use the 



Th: Fewer cf Christ' s Words. 43 

same power which made Him strong; His regard 
for the poor and suffering is the recognition of the 
soul within them ; His words of exhortation, "What 
shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and 
lose his own soul ?" are akin to His proud and con- 
tented declaration, '* I am not alone, because the 
Father is with me." As He exalts Himself, He 
exalts us. He speaks to that mysterious power of 
the soul within us which God gave, to which all 
increase of knowledge has not been able to give 
one new revelation, which for its strength demands 
new words from God, just as itself, when kindled 
anew in the successive generations of men, is the 
only really new thing which the world ever ac- 
quires. When He who thus speaks to men tells 
us that He is the Son of God, we believe Him by 
reason of His words, for never did other man speak 
so. It is just what we expect ; it is but the natural 
completion of His message. His declaration of 
Himself is not only inseparable from His words, 
and something without which they fall to pieces, 
but it is the message which the human soul is look- 
ing for. In the midst of all changes of doctrine it 
continues. The human mind works with the great 
revelation; it just thinks that it has expressed the 
mystery in words, when a new turn in the wheel of 
human thought throws the neatly formed doctrine 
into confusion, and sends us back to Christ Him- 



44 T^^^^ Power of Christ's Words. 

self, that we may learn from Him of the great 
revelation of God. Personal power such as Christ 
exercised, personal authority such as is embodied 
in His words, if it did not point to God, if it had 
not come directly from Him as its source, would 
have been the destruction of the world long ago ; it 
would have been another rebellion of sin, worse than 
any by which man first fell. It would have sought 
some basis, and found it, as civil or ecclesiastical 
systems have done time after time, in worldly posi- 
tion and material advantages. But Christ is as 
simple a source of authority as He ever was. He 
has changed no more than have the laws of God's 
universe, as man has turned them to his various 
purposes. He still speaks to the souls of men, 
joining Himself and His Father inseparably to- 
gether : ** Ye believe in God, believe also in me." 

There is no deeper cause of thankfulness, then, 
than that we can get to Christ Himself, and learn 
His words of life from Himself to-day. To give 
men that privilege, to regain it or to keep it intact 
for them, has been the purpose of every true re- 
ligious reformation, or revolution, or revival ; they 
have all been successful in proportion as they have 
done that. They may have left other things un- 
touched ; but in doing that, they were strong. It 
should be the one object of all religious progress 
and enlightenment to-day. We may shatter old 



The Power of Christ's Words. 45 

idols of tradition, only to put more symmetrical 
ones of modern knowledge in their place. But it 
is not the ugliness of the idol that constitutes its 
danger: it is, that it obscures the great living Per- 
son whom it professes to represent. Let Christ 
speak for Himself. It is probable that those officers 
were very prejudiced as they approached Christ to 
seize Him. The constant misrepresentations of 
Pharisees, the occasional hearing of the distorted 
ideas of enthusiastic discfples, must have sent them 
there little prepared for what befell them. But the 
great Saviour of all men was too powerful for all 
adverse influences. His words made that body of 
men bold to return to their superiors, and to assert 
a truth which has never failed since. By the use 
of that power of words "which we men are misusing 
every day. He turned the whole current of their 
thought and feeling toward them. Transmitted 
by means which the world has also misused, those 
words are also with us to-day. Who can doubt that 
they are equally potent, and that every human soul 
that loves duty can to-day find in them that same 
revelation of the power of God, which is the only 
hope of life eternal.'* 



IV. 



GOD THE POWER OF MAN'S SOCIAL 

LIFE. 

''^ Rejoicing 171 the habitable paj'ts of ths earlh ; and viy delights 
were with the sons of w^«." — Proverbs viii. 31. 

THERE has always been recognized, as running 
through the Book of Proverbs, a strong per- 
sonal tone, which binds together all its parts. 
All its good advice and practical wisdom are 
uttered as coming from the lips of some living 
person. Either Solomon gives the advice as from 
himself to his son, or he repeats the words of 
wisdom as he has heard them from his father, 
or, as in this eighth chapter. Wisdom speaks of 
herself as a person, describes her character and 
life, and pictures her followers as closely connected 
with herself personally. If we lose this spirit 
from it, we lose much of the profit of the book. 
It falls apart into a number of detached precepts, 
none of which lend any help to each other, and 
which confuse us by their very multitude. This 
particular chapter, by its details, and by the way in 
which Wisdom pictures herself standing by God, 
46 



God the Power of Man's Social Life, 47 

rejoicing the heart of God, and working with Him, 
shows that this personification which runs through 
the book is no mere trick of rhetoric to draw and 
keep men's attention. If it were, it would have 
no real power. But when Solomon spoke of wis- 
dom, he really meant somebody who would stand 
by a man, and help him in what he had to do ; he. 
conceived all true wisdom as the words of a living 
soul speaking to other living souls. He did not 
believe there could be any true wisdom without 
such a soul behind it. The words of our text 
carry out this idea to its truest result. Wisdom 
has been describing how she was by God as one 
brought up by Him, how He and she rejoiced in 
each other: and then she says, In all that work 
of creation I wished to be not only with God, but 
with God's creature, man ; my special joy was in 
that part of the earth where man could dwell, — 
"rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth." I 
delighted to be wherever man was, — "my delights 
were with the sons of men." Only living souls 
dehght to be with living souls. Animals in their 
natural state flee the footsteps of man ; the parts 
of the earth habitable by man must be left by 
them : the buffalo is extinct where American civili- 
zation has advanced. Nature shows her brightest 
colors, and revels in the greatest magnificence, 
where men cannot see her ; and, when they come, 



4^S God the Power cf Man's Social Life. 

:her glories in great measure pass away. But, be- 
. cause she is a living soul, true wisdom remains 
— nay, lives with greater delight — wherever man 
;abounds. It is that link of personality which binds 
•us to God. 

We want a personal wisdom, if wisdom is to 
■dwell among men. All our experience tells us 
that. We have heard and read a great deal of 
good advice in life, but we all know the surpassing 
power of that which has come with the force of a 
;living soul back of it. We treasure to-day in a 
;manner out of all keeping with its intrinsic im- 
portance some word or custom left us by a parent 
tor teacher or friend. We trace back some word 
'which for generations, perhaps, has guided those 
'with whom we are connected. It comes now 
;Sacred to us because many living people have 
lUsed it, and spoken it to others. Where did it 
fCome from first } How did it come first to have 
any power } Was it spoken out of the air } Did 
it come from the law of an inanimate earth .'' It 
never could have been strong enough to have 
moved living men, if that were its origin. We 
hear some man speak, and his words have a far 
greater force than his writings ever convey. Per- 
haps the very thing he is trying to prove is, that 
man's personal influence is of no importance. 
And we believe him, just because his personal in- 



Go J ihe Power cf Man's Social Life. 49 

fluence is so great ; because he seems so honest or 
wise, or is so enthusiastic, we say we are convinced. 
But we go away, and think a great deal more of 
the man than of the theory. We are influenced 
by the impress of his character in every act of 
our Hves, while we forget the theory, or keep it 
only for a discussion. A man of power cannot 
argue away the power of man's soul : he is all the 
time speaking against himself. He can point to 
a greater personal power ; he is a witness to that 
fact of personal power, and can use his own wit- 
ness to point men on in that line. He can say, 
" If you believe in me, you ought to believe in that 
greater Power who made me what I am. If you 
delight in my wisdom, you ought to delight in Him 
who is the source of all wisdom." But he cannot 
say, " If you believe in me, you ought not to be- 
lieve in anybody;" and for that reason a man is 
doing his true work only when he is pointing to God. 
That is a work which can employ all his powers : 
there is no contradiction in that. But when he is 
doing any thing less than that, his life is all disor- 
ganized ; now he points upward by his personal 
power, and now he points downward by his low 
theories, or base tastes, or earthly inclinations. If 
we would be true to ourselves and true to our fellow- 
men, we must be true to our God. We must have 
Him close to us as a reality ; we must hear Him as 



50 God th^ Power of Man's Social Life. 

a person ; we must know that all wisdom comes 
from Him. Solomon spoke of what his father had 
taught him ; but then, when he was conscious of 
still greater wisdom within him which his father 
never gave him, he knew that that, too, must have a 
personal voice to speak it, or it would not be strong. 
Shall we constantly listen to human voices and be 
swayed by them, and not listen to the voice of God "^ 
Every man can testify that he has, time after time, 
violated some law of morality, or stumbled in some 
crisis of his life, because the word of wisdom was 
so vague ; it came he knew not whence, and it 
was silenced by his warm personal desires. Israel 
had the law given to it written by the finger of 
God ; they had heard the voice cf God speaking 
out of the smoke of Sinai : so must we hear, and 
be conscious of God as a personal God ; so do we 
need religion, which is the knowledge of the per- 
sonal God, to make us wise unto salvation. And 
we can see, therefore, how absurd and contradictory 
is any idea that religion is intended primarily for 
ascetics far away in their retreats from the habita- 
tions of men, or for theologians busy over their 
books. Meditation and study are useful in this just 
as they are in any other matter that we are going 
to carry on among men. But it is our relation to 
men that is to open to us our relation to God, the 
personal God, in its truest light. Wisdom rejoices 



God the Pozi'er of Man's Social Life, 5 1 

in the habitable parts of the earth, not in the 
monastic retreats of a dreary desert or wilderness ; 
Wisdom's delights are among the sons of men, not 
in the midst of books. The inestimable advantages 
gained in those places only become wisdom as they 
are used among men, just as the wheat, growing 
on. some distant prairie, where few eyes ever rest 
upon its beauties, becomes food only as it reaches 
the crowded city, where men are longing for it, 
and would die without it. Wisdom is in the world, 
where men are ; she delights to be there : we need 
not leave the world to find her, if we will only 
hear the voice of God just where we are. The 
sins and failings of men can speak warnings to us; 
the needs of men can stir our activities ; the kind- 
ness and goodness of men can point to God's 
greater love. Everywhere hands point up to God 
and our true relations to Him, if only we will let 
Him be as real, as truly personal, as the rest of the 
world is to us. This very life that we think has 
no God in it is full of such a God. And our 
excuses for not hearing God because of the pres- 
ence of the world about us, only call forth the an- 
swer. If you are really and truly in the world as 
God meant you should be, why do you not find 
God there .-* You say that you value the world : 
why do you not get at its greatest feature, — God's 
life within it ^ 



52 God the Power of Man's Social Life. 

The personification of wisdom in the Book of 
Proverbs has always been considered to be Solo- 
mon's statement of the person of Christ, and it is 
called his prophecy of Christ. Every great char- 
acter of the Old Testament foretold of Christ in his 
own way. Moses, the man who had received the 
law in the midst of the awfulness of Sinai, who 
had led the people, almost against their will, up 
into a land flowing with milk and honey, saw, as 
his picture of the great coming One, a prophet 
who should speak the law of God with power and 
persuasiveness, which should make the people 
hearken and follow. David at one time, in his 
shepherd or his outlaw life, saw a shepherd and 
a sustainer in troubles arise ; in the days of his 
rising kingdom he saw a regal power, the perfect 
king, of which he was but a type, coming to rule 
in peace, and subdue all nations to his sway. Sol- 
omon most naturally, the man whose mind was 
strengthened, whose preference was for the gift 
of wisdom before all other things, thought, When 
God shall appear on earth. He will be the personifi- 
cation of wisdom, — one whom all will be able to 
follow and to know as their master everywhere. 
We need not say that -all those great men under- 
stood about the coming of Christ, or prophesied 
consciously of Him. But the great fact is, that 
Christ fulfilled all their desires and all their 



God the Power of Man's Social Life. 53 

dreams, and that He supplied a different want to 
each of them. Just as He is different to all of us 
to-day, supplying to one comfort, another wisdom, 
another strength against temptation, so the great 
figure of Him that was to come made itself felt to 
those worthies, as it said to each, " That which you 
desire and are striving for shall be supplied in its 
best form." And in this case of Solomon it is a 
noble idea, that, when the wisdom of God comes 
to the earth, it is to come as a person. It is not to 
be written in a book, or manifested in some won- 
derful and strange arrangements : it is to be a lov- 
ing and sociable person, one w^ho rejoices in the 
habitable parts of the earth, and whose delights 
are among the sons of men. That will be the 
nearest approach to heaven that men can ever 
have. The wisdom of God has always been writ- 
ten on the earth which we tread under our feet, as 
well as on the planets that roll over our heads. The 
wonders of the sea are as great as those of the 
sky ; the lifting of a man's hand is as remarkable, 
in all that it implies, as is the spreading of an arch- 
angel's wing. But the archangel knows God, and 
feels His personal presence, where the man sees 
Him in His works. Give to the man the wisdom of 
God personally present with him in all his deahngs, 
and as a part of his surroundings, and you be- 
stow upon him that which makes his life equal in 



54 God ihe Power of Man's Social Life. 

dignity and power to any in the universe. That 
it furnishes that, will be the pre-eminent claim and 
boast of Christianity ; not that it fills men with more 
wisdom, but that it gives a personality to that wis- 
dom. See, then, how important is that sociable ele- 
ment of the life of Christ. John the Baptist might 
stay in the wilderness, and dwell on the banks of 
the Jordan : Christ must delight in the habitable 
parts of the earth, walk the streets of Jerusalem, 
pass through the regions of heretical and despised 
Samaria, and make His home in that rich and 
populous basin of the Lake of Gennesaret. He 
retired into the mountain to pray, but it was at 
night, when men were sleeping. Before He went 
there He taught and fed the five thousand; after He 
returned He went immediately to the aid of His dis- 
ciples toiling on the Sea of Tiberias. He went up 
to the Feast of Tabernacles when it was at its height, 
and on the great day of the feast, when all the 
throng were there, spoke to men so that His ene- 
mies declared, " Never man spake like this man." 
That last great week of His life was spent openly 
in Jerusalem ; only at night He retired to the seclu- 
sion of the family home at Bethlehem. Where 
men were, there He delighted to be; there Avas His 
place of work. Never was there a life so open, so 
little dependent upon seclusion, apparently gather- 
ing strength from its work. And must it not 



God the Power of Mans Social Life. 55 

equally be a feature of any view of Christ's life 
to-day ? No strength belongs to the Gospel unless 
it is an intimate, a sociable thing with us, finding 
its field of work in daily contact with life, always 
ready to go with us into any place where our hu- 
man activities lead us. No true knowledge of 
Christ is ours unless He supplies to us this place 
of an intimate friend, embodying in the very best 
form all the help and power that we are ever 
gathering from our fellow-men. When the power 
of a friend's hand is felt, then we must remember 
the power of that Friend who lasts forever ; who is 
never cold, never estranged, never dies. We like 
to think that all Solomon's admonitions to broth- 
erly love and assistance, of which we feel the truth 
every day, found their fulfilment in that great Son 
of man who fulfilled also his great picture of per- 
sonified wisdom. Nay, the very warnings of our 
sinful fellow-man, — are they not repeated in that 
Cross which held the innocent sufferer, and which 
told forever the terrible penalty that sin carries, 
and which was borne by Him who suffered for us .'' 
*'The place where Jesus was crucified was near 
unto the city," wrote the Gospel historian. It is 
true to-day. That Cross is near unto this city, near 
to all our lives in all its parts, near enough for us, 
in all its manifold cares, to have the picture of its 
perfect love before us. We are passing it every 



56 God the Power of Man's Social Life. 

day in all our life, drawing close to the very things 
that made up its power. It is for that that Christ 
came down and died for us, — that we might know 
the personal love and forgiveness of our God, and 
go after Him in dutiful service, with loving hearts. 
There is no acceptable service without that ; there 
is no wisdom that is a dead set of laws. And 
therefore Christ is our salvation, since He is the 
wisdom of God and the power of God coming near 
to us to lead us and guide us. For that reason, 
where is there any salvation out of Him } 

Wisdom delights in the habitable parts of the 
earth, and rejoices to be among the sons of men. 
Can it always be so } How often we tire of the 
very noise of our fellow-men, and wish to flee afar 
off, and be at rest ! Wisdom cannot feel that ex- 
haustion. But how often the most habitable parts 
of the earth are the very homes of the foolishness 
of sin ! We see their wickedness and foolishness : 
must not wisdom itself see it much more } Are 
the social regulations of our life to-day likely to 
please the heart of wisdom, and make her long to 
be among them ? How much true wisdom do they 
cultivate among those who are devoted to them } 
Wisdom may be in our streets, but it must be as a 
very sorrowful resident, as she sees soul after soul 
that she loves lost in the desire of gain, associat- 
ing with its fellow-man only for selfish purposes. 



God the Power of Man's Social Life. 57 

The souls might delight her, and make her stay ; 
but would the lives, which she saw those souls 
leading, do so ? What can we do to make society 
and life generally worthy of this great presence 
which is ever in it ? No laws, no customs, no in- 
stitutions, that we can establish for business or the 
State, no prescriptions that we may make for social 
life, will do the work ; for those are impersonal, 
and what we have seen to be valuable to the world 
is the personal presence of wisdom. And that 
must find its expression in our personal lives. All 
that makes society attractive, or city-life prosper- 
ous, to-day, came from God, and in that fact has 
its power for us. For that reason, it cannot be 
ignored or put out of sight. But why, then, is it 
so dangerous to us "^ Because it destroys our sense 
of personal responsibility, which is the great thing 
by which we are to show forth the true character 
of God's wisdom. How many men are doing 
things because they are necessary, they say, be- 
cause everybody does them, though often their 
consciences may condemn them ! How many 
women live in a way in society which they know 
destroys all earnestness and spirituality, because it 
is unfashionable to do otherwise! They, with liv- 
ing souls, do not dare to break away from the 
trammels which some impersonal custom and 
usage has put upon them. Do we not want, then, 



58 God the Power of Man's Social Life. 

in daily life, a deeper appreciation of the wise 
man's crowning picture of the personality of wis- 
dom ? Be followers of Christ, personal friends of 
Jesus. No matter what others do, stand out for 
what your own soul tells you to be right. To dare 
to take such a stand requires full conviction that 
wisdom is personally with you. None but a 
Christian can do that, and a Christian can never 
do any thing else. Recognize the fact that Christ 
is in all that is good, and that by being true to 
Him you cannot possibly get out of the stream of 
the world's true life. You will have to leave some 
things that are false, you will have to condemn 
them by leaving them ; but all which truly belongs 
to men must ultimately be the possession of those 
who have the wisdom whose delights are among 
the sons of men. Youns: men and women who are 
feeling now what a glorious thing this world is, to 
whom it belongs in all its fulness, will you miss 
this its greatest possession, — that personal wisdom 
which fills it all "^ Will you not open your hearts 
to God, that you may know and understand the 
pleasures of God's world .-^ Take them as from 
a heavenly Father ; take them as servants of 
Christ ; take them as being yourself filled with the 
spirit of Him who made them, that you may know 
how to use them rightly ; take them as personal 
things, not as mere playthings dropped into your 



God the Power of Man's Social Life. 59 

lap. A great responsibility rests on you, one that 
no other can fulfil. As you, fired now with the 
ambitions and excitements of the life of gain or 
honor that opens to you, or charmed with the 
glitter and pleasures of society that invites you, 
put your personal life into Christ's keeping, and 
determine that as His servant, and relying on His 
strength, you will be personally wise in your work, 
will do nothing that will injure your character, and 
will be more anxious for God's approval than for 
man's praise and glory, you will do your part to 
make the world a fit dwelling-place for God. It is 
useless for others to preach or plan for the puri- 
fication of either the world's business or politics 
or amusements, unless those who make up that 
world in its greatest activity are filled with that 
spirit. It is the spirit of Christ in those who form 
society, that will be able to frown down wrong, 
rebuke vice, and destroy dishonesty. 

We cannot go out of this world. Our relations 
here to each other are the test of what we are. 
Man is and must be a social being : solitary con- 
finement kills him. Is it not a great thing, then, 
to learn that our God in all ways answers this de- 
mand of our lives "i He loves to be among us ; He 
is never far from us. How often He must long 
to speak to us, and to hear our recognition of Him 
answer back to His love for us ! We use His habit- 



6o God the Power of Man's Social Life. 

able earth, we mingle with and delight in our fel- 
low-men, His creatures : we can do at least as much 
for God. Rejoice in Him, delight in being where 
He is, follow always the man Christ Jesus, and 
then God and man will dwell together in our 
hearts, and the world shall be really and steadily 
advancing toward that time when the habitable 
parts of this earth shall be the very dwelling-place 
of God in all its thoughts and actions. 



V. 



MAN'S POWER DEPENDENT UPON HIS 
KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 

^^ And the ivord of the Lord came unto me^ sayings Son of many 
What is the vine tree viore than aity tree^ or than a branch iiohich is 
among the trees of the forest ? Shall wood be taken thereof to do any 
work ? or zuill men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon ? Behold, 
it is cast into the fire for fuel ; the fire devoureth both the ejids of it, 
and the midst of it is burned. Is it meet for ajty work /"' — EzEK. 
XV. 1-4. 

THROUGHOUT the Old Testament the figure 
of a vine is constantly applied to the people 
of Israel. The nation was a vine which had been 
transplanted from Egypt to Canaan ; God's care of 
it was like a husbandman's care of his vineyard, — 
active, precise, and full. His justification of His 
demands upon them was, ''What could I have done 
more for my vineyard that I have not done for it "^ " 
The one object of that planting and care was, that 
the nation was to produce rich fruit for its Lord ; 
its one glory was to be the abundant clusters that 
hung upon it waiting for His gathering, and ready 
to yield their rich juice in His wine-press. All 

these items of the comparison get a new force, 

61 



62 Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God, 

however, from the way in which it is carried on in 
our text, taken from the prophecy of Ezekiel. The 
nation had sinned, and now refused to acknowledge 
its sin. Proud from the memories of the glory 
which God's blessing had given it in the past, it 
refused all further care from God ; it would take 
care of itself; it would not submit to God's pun- 
ishments, which came by reason of their rebelling 
against His control ; it would fight and conquer, 
independent of God. So God, through His prophet, 
carries out His figure of a vine. What is a vine, 
compared to other trees 1 Who would use it for 
any work 1 What strength is there in it, even to 
make a pin .-* What substance is there to it, to 
make it fit even for firewood "^ It crackles, burns 
right away, and is gone. A vine-tree that bears no 
fruit is more contemptible than all else. By this 
figure, then, God would show the people how neces- 
sary He is to them. It is not by accident that He 
has blessed them in the way that He has. It was 
the only way in which they really could be blessed, 
and they were not at liberty to choose any other. 
The knowledge of God as their Master, and the 
stern moral training to which He had subjected 
them, were the only things upon which they could 
rest their hopes. They would see the wisdom of 
His action as they gradually found how un suited 
to other work they really were, and how little they 



Man's Pozirr Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 63 

could accomplish in other fields. Surely, it has 
ever been so in the case of this people to whom 
God spoke by the prophet. All history has shown 
this parable to be true. It was the moral and 
religious power of the Jewish nation which was 
their strength. When they abandoned that, they 
failed. Other nations exceeded them in material 
resources, other minds surpassed them in philo- 
sophical acuteness and power of expression, other 
people are identified more surely in history with 
pictures of great wealth and Eastern magnifi- 
cence ; but through all ancient literature that 
wonderful people are ever appearing as the hold- 
ers of a strange and powerful religion, which in 
some way had an influence out of all proportion 
to the power of the people who propagated it, 
which gained an influence over men of all 
nations and ages, and held captive, time an=d time 
again, the very conquerors of the land. In all his- 
torical comparisons that nation must always be 
most prominent which started with the Ten Com- 
mandments for its first law-book, and has trans- 
mitted to nearly all the civilized world its principles 
of moral action. That is a conquest more lasting 
than any which the armies of Rome, or the philoso- 
phers of Greece, or the dynasties of the East, could 
ever accomplish. The vine as a vine, did a work 
which as a tree, as mere wood, it could not ac- 



64 Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 

complish ; its clusters did for the glory of God and 
the blessing of man what its branches never could 
accomplish. 

This parable and its fulfilment lay down the priij- 
ciple, that what God offers is the only thing that 
is good for us, and that comparative failure awaits 
us in any other paths than those of His opening. 
God's offers in this light are commands. We are 
free to accept them as far as our will goes, but we 
are bound to accept them as far as our nature goes. 
God, in offering, always has a tone of freest invita- 
tion ; but all the time, from our own lives, if we 
would only hear it, there is constantly arising the 
loudest command to us to accept His offers. The 
soft and sweet element is in God's own will, which 
would have us His children; the stern element is 
in our lives as men, which are failures without the 
possession of just those things which God offers in 
religion. Those things are moral power and knowl- 
edge of Himself. And when we consider ourselves 
without those things in this world of ours, does 
not the parable of Ezekiel, of the vine-tree, which 
tries to make itself useful without bearing fruit, 
apply to man everywhere and at all times ? For 
compare our physical powers with those about us : 
they are nothing at all. Let a man train himself 
to all the strength possible, and he cannot grapple 
with one of God's wild animals. Let loose the lion 



Man's Pcwcr Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 65 

on the strongest man, and human nature must yield. 
You harness the horse to draw your carriage ; you 
employ a machine to do your hard work surely and 
rapidly. You know that your fellow-man is not 
suited to those purposes. Man is the weakest thing 
in all creation. Or, you turn to mental power, the 
power of contrivance, the fitting of means to ends ; 
none of these, as we see them in man, can com- 
pare with the contrivances of the animal kingdom. 
Every smallest creature, and some of them by won- 
derful skill, provides precisely what he wants for 
himself in shelter and food ; and who of us does 
as much for himself ? Who can do his work as 
systematically or thoroughly as the animals } Who 
feels as completely satisfied with the result } Or, 
look at beauty and its realization. The artist 
power in man has worked at it for centuries, 
and yet its only ambition to-day would be to be 
able to depict the beauty of the human figure, or 
to reproduce nature's own pictures. On every side 
there are powers at work which arrive at more 
beauty than man, with all his thought, can ever 
reach. Leave out moral power, and leave out the 
desire of man to go upward, and what is he but 
the weakest and most dissatisfied creature on earth } 
What is this vine-tree, then, more than any tree.-* 
Will men take a pin of it to hang any vessel thereon } 
Is it meet for any work .-* Understand the position 



66 Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 

of the Bible about man, and see how true it is. 
"What is man," says the Psalmist, ''that Thou art 
mindful of him ? and the son of man, that Thou vis- 
itest him ? " David said this when he considered 
the heavens and the moon and the stars ; and surely 
we men, who, with all our wisdom, have never yet 
moved one heavenly body out of its course, and 
are still looking up into the heavens like little chil- 
dren gazing out of the window at twilight, and who 
feel so proud if, like those children, we can only 
say, " I think I see another star," surely we are not 
yet ready to wipe out the record of the insignifi- 
cance of man. We read over Jehovah's challenge 
to Job to explain the mysteries of the universe and 
to control the powers of the natural world, and we 
feel that the Bible of modern science would add a 
thousand such chapters on the helplessness of man 
amid the various circumstances which surround his 
life, and hold him captive, and compel him to be 
what he is. St. James's challenge, ''What is your 
life.'*" has a deep meaning as it is echoed to us from 
all the graves that are taking away what seems to 
us powerful and beautiful in life ; and the parable 
of the rich fool has its real significance doubled in 
these days, when men are able to heap up such for- 
tunes as kings alone could once possess, and yet 
are compelled to leave them and their power to pass 
into the hands of others. The power of man over 



Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. Gy 

the things of this world sinks into insignificance 
in the midst of sucli sights, which are so striking 
in these days of human greatness. Many a vine- 
tree leaves not enough substance behind to make a 
single peg to hold the sHghtest burden. The Bible 
is true ; nowhere, in no department, is man's rela- 
tive importance increased ; everywhere new limita- 
tions are constantly springing up. More than ever 
man is shut up to his own proper life of rich fruit- 
bearing work for good purposes. More than ever 
we know, that, if man is going to triumph in this 
world, it is to be by the deeper cultivation of charac- 
ter, and by his moral and spiritual superiority to the 
rest of creation. Whatever cultivates that, offers 
the true line of action, to which a man must devote 
himself. Be proud of any thing but your own power 
to know God, and to reach out after Him, and to 
aspire to be like Him in moral character, and 
you are wasting your life. All nature puts you to 
shame. The lily in the field still says to us, and to 
our attempts to rival it, " Even Solomon in all his 
glory was not arrayed like one of these." Learn 
that lesson everywhere, and at once we begin to 
rise. Be humble, see how the riches of the world 
dwarf any fortune you may succeed in making, how 
the power and beauty of the inanimate or animal 
creation throw into the shade any thing that you 
may accomplish, and at once you will begin to seek 



6S Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 

the true riches which God alone can give, and which 
man alone, of all God's creatures, can possess. 
Humility is the gate of entrance into power al- 
ways. Go and sit down in the lowest seat at the 
world's feast, see how other things surpass you, 
and then soon you will hear the voice of the mas- 
ter of the feast saying, Friend, go up higher. 
" Then shalt thou have worship in the presence of 
them that sit at meat with thee ; " then shalt thou 
learn thy superiority, as God's child, over all other 
things in the world ; then will all things be yours. 
For then you will begin to be God's vine ; you will 
develop just those things in which the vine excels, 
— dependence, life, and fruit. You will lean more 
on God, when you hear the world's lesson that you 
cannot stand alone ; you will search after Christ, 
and be joined with Him, as you see your weakness; 
you will feel the need of God's being close to us in 
Christ, as you see how necessary God is to man for 
man's own glory and success ; you will put your 
energy into the work of producing fruit for God, 
when once you learn that that fruit is the only 
means of strength that man has open to him. You 
will try to have God see your power in the fruit, 
and not simply man see it in the size to which you 
grow ; you will look for His approval more than for 
man's admiration and praise. Be not dismayed 
when sometimes God reads you a lesson of your 



Man's Power Dependent upon Knoi:ledge of God. 69 

weakness, by taking from you that in which you 
trust. You ought to read that lesson all about 
you in moments of the greatest prosperity ; and, 
because you will not, God, by some stroke of His 
providence, says to you, in your pride, " Son of 
man, What is the vine tree more than any tree?" 
How often, when we have grown on our vine- 
tree some branch that we think will be a cause 
of admiration to men, God cuts it off ! and He 
always does it that we may produce fruit, and 
not mere firewood or wooden pins. If God has 
given you other things, do not be proud of them, 
and remember that they do not make up your Lfe ; 
do not devote yourself to them. These little glim- 
merings of other than moral power that appear in 
man are not to make up his life any more than the 
little traces of intelligence or affection in the animal 
constitute his life. The dog is best who does his 
duty, not the one who sits up most cunningly and 
begs. That is a mere curiosity which we value 
only because it is out of its place. So let us be 
what God made us to be. Be God's servants, not 
mere owners of property, not mere ornaments 
to society, not mere seekers of pleasure ; for that 
is not your calling or your true strength. The 
conclusion of that Forty-ninth Psalm none of us 
can deny to-day : " Man that is in honor, and 
MJiderstandeth not, is like the beasts that perish." 



70 Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 

We have seen that man's strength as man, 
compared with the rest of creation, is in knowing 
God. Now let us see that it is likewise the 
strength of the individual man, as compared with 
his fellow-man, to know God. A man's real 
strength, in comparison with others, is to be him- 
self, to bring out just what he has in him. And 
yet it is sometimes hard to see how this is to be 
done. We are all very much alike in our abilities 
and surroundings. It is sometimes humiliating to 
see how our best achievements, our brightest 
thoughts, on which we pride ourselves, are sud- 
denly reproduced by other men, just when we 
thought that we were surpassing them, or had 
struck out a new line of action. What is the differ- 
ence between the individual power of a school of 
children enjoying the same teachers, using the 
same books, with very much the same surroundings 
in life "i It is a difference in moral power that will 
determine for each one his place in life. That one 
who has high ideas, noble ambitions, lofty pictures, 
will succeed in life. It is not what is around us, 
but what is in us, that brings out our power. Two 
vines will be just alike in the amount of food that 
they furnish for the flames, or the amount of 
strength that they can put into wooden pins that 
are made out of their branches ; but, when they 
produce fruit, then you know the difference be- 



Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 71 

tween them. It is as a fruit-bearing vine that 
each shows its innermost nature. So we find our 
place in life by the way we live for God. In God's 
vineyard each vine has its own peculiar kind of fruit 
to bear. A power that goes down deep into our 
souls will bring out varieties of character which 
more superficial forces cannot possibly reach. 
Every man ought to assert himself. Men and 
women have no right to be like so many bricks in 
the social structure, — all cast in one mould, all of 
one hue and shape. If out of our faces and in our 
actions, there appeared the power of God's love 
working upon us, if each of us appreciated the 
privilege of being a child in God's family, surely it 
would not be so. Two children are never precisely 
alike in a family : the deep family life finds out the 
difference. No other force in life can bring out 
the power of each man. But this one glorifies us 
all ; it goes into the life of the humblest son of 
man, and finds out just what God has put there; 
it makes that man bold to stand up and declare 
himself, because he is a vine of the Lord's plant- 
ing : his clusters may be few, but they will be his 
own. In other things — in wealth, in power, in 
knowledge — others may surpass him ; but those are 
not the things that are the test of a man. Those 
things are to pass away ; in those every man is weak : 
but in character, in knowledge of God, he has his 



J 2 Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 

own treasures brought to his own individual soul 
by God's own hand in His own way; and it is that 
which makes him strong where the strength of 
man alone lies. The hope of the individual man 
lies in the knowledge of Christ. If you would 
know your own place in life, and fill it, and cease 
to be one of a crowd of men, get the knowledge of 
th§. Saviour, who can alone teach you of God ; de- 
pend upon Him, draw your life from Him, produce 
your fruit for Him. Let Him deepen your moral 
life. Seek not the things of this life, which, if you 
succeed in obtaining, will only place your name a 
little higher or lower in a list of others who are 
very much like you ; but strive for that knowledge 
of God which shall write your individual name in 
the Lamb's book of life, never to be blotted out, 
the name of a child of God. 

Let me make one more application of the proph- 
et's parable ; that is, to the Christian life. Mankind 
is God's great vine, and every man is a vine ; but 
above all, those whom God has chosen constitute 
the great vine, the peculiar people like Israel of 
old, whom He has chosen to bear fruit for Himself. 
The object of Christianity is to do that, and It 
should never be used for any thing else. It should 
never be made to kindle a light flame, that we may 
feel ourselves comfortable at it ; it should never be 
made a mere peg upon which to hang the easy, 



Mans Power Dependent iLpon Kucwledge of Cod. y^, 

conventional morality of the times. Christianity 
is a struggle to produce fruit for God; it is to 
do what nothing else can do : it is never to be 
degraded to other uses. When we come in con- 
tact with any thing that is called Christian, let 
us see that we use it rightly. Christian services 
are not to be used to please our aesthetic tastes ; 
Christian truth is not to be a mere weak substance 
for us to be sentimental over ; Christian churches 
and the attendance on them are not to be used as 
the stamp of social standing, or as a badge of good 
intentions ; Christian profession is not to be a for- 
mality with which to satisfy our consciences ; 
Christian doctrine is not to be a mere subject of 
discussion. To use this strong, fruitful Gospel of 
ours in any such way is like using a vine for fire- 
wood. There are plenty of things in life that will 
answer any of those purposes alone better than 
this Christianity of ours can possibly do. The 
vine will only be destroyed, and do no good. But 
Christianity is to make us better men and women ; 
it is to make us God's servants in all that we do ; it 
is to make us know that He is our God, because He 
has sent Christ to be our Saviour; it is to raise our 
standard of life, and make us know that we are sin- 
ners ; it is to tell us that our sins are forgiven, and. 
to make us firm, by the love of God in us, to turn 
from those sins, and walk in newness of life. Let 



74 Man's Power Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 

that be the way we hold our Christianity out to men, 
in word and in deed, as we use it thus ourselves. 
Such a power men need ; such a power Christ alone 
can supply. There is none of us that does not 
demand it by the very fact of his manhood, and 
that cannot receive it from our Saviour. So we 
shall all be vines bringing forth fruit for the Lord. 
You remember Jotham's parable in the ninth 
chapter of Judges : ** The trees went forth on a 
time to anoint a king over them ; and they said 
unto the olive tree. Reign thou over us. But the 
olive tree said unto them. Should I leave my fat- 
ness, wherewith by me they honor God and man, 
and go to be promoted over the trees 1 And the 
trees said to the fig tree. Come thou, and reign 
over us. But the fig tree said unto them, Should I 
forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to 
be promoted over the trees } Then said the trees 
unto the vine. Come thou, and reign over us. And 
the vine said unto them. Should I leave my wine, 
which cheereth God and man, and go to be pro- 
moted over the trees } Then said all the trees unto 
the bramble. Come thou, and reign over us. And 
the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye 
anoint me king over you, then come and put your 
trust in my shadow : and if not, let fire come out 
of the bramble, and devour the cedars of Lebanon." 
Is it not a parable of our life ? " Come, and reign 



Man's Pcnver Dependent upon Knowledge of God. 75 

over us," cry all things below and around us ; 
"take the sceptre ; be powerful." The true voice 
answers, " I will not leave my fruit for God." Only 
the bramble will accept such a call. God says, 
" Stay in your place ; do your best work for me." 
He sends Christ to help us do it ; as we wish to 
do that, we will rejoice in Him, and accept Him as 
our Master. 



VI. 

FAITH IN GOD AND IN CHRIST. 

**^ Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in 
mej'^ — John xiv. i. 

A TROUBLED heart is not a pleasant thing ; 
and he who can ease one such heart, or Hghten 
one human care, deserves the honor and praise of 
his fellow-men. But he who should go farther, and 
put a stop to all troubles, would be more than 
human : he would stand beside God, and be carry- 
ing out God's work, since on man, the child of God, 
he would be bestowing that which would truly make 
him what he should be. When, then, Christ pre- 
pares to give His disciples advice and power, which, 
in all the difficulties and troubles that were before 
them, should keep their hearts still and confident, 
we cannot wonder that He claims for Himself a 
position in their lives which hitherto God alone 
had held. The greatness of His work prepares us 
for the bold statement, " You will he happy if you 
believe in me as implicitly as you believe in God. 
As hitherto your faith in God has given you comfort 
and strength : so, to remove all the remainder of 
76 



Faith in God and in Christ, jy 

care and trouble, to strengthen you for all the 
trouble which is before you, you must believe in 
me." 

So Christ connects His power to still the 
troubles of man, with the power of God to do 
the same thing. If there is no power in belief in 
God, there is none in belief in Him ; but if that 
belief in God is the most valuable thing in life, 
then the belief in Him should be sought and held 
with greatest tenacity. 

How much the belief in God had done for that 
Jewish nation, of which those disciples were loyal 
citizens, every one knows who has read his Bible 
with any attention. It had supported the hearts 
of leaders and people through many strange adver- 
sities ; it had given a unity to the history from 
Abraham to Christ ; it had inspired judges and 
prophets to lift their voices in the days of the 
nation's depravity and sin. Every man felt the 
dignity and power of belonging to a nation specially 
called and chosen to do God's work. For many 
years, and even centuries, hearts had laid aside 
their trouble, because they believed in God. The 
whole Old Testament is given us, not to illustrate 
the power or goodness of men, — the sins of its 
heroes refute such an idea as that, — but to show 
forth, by the details and by the unity of the history, 
the power of a belief in God. And the same belief 



y'^ Faith in God and in Christ. 

in a God works in the same way to-day. A man is 
diligent, self-sacrificing, and earnest in his business : 
he has maxims of high integrity, of unswerving 
honesty, of unremitting diligence ; he believes in 
them, and in their avenging power. For himself, 
as well as for others, violation of those laws must 
bring punishment. They are above and beyond 
him ; to them he subjects his comfort, his fortune, 
perhaps his very life itself. As a reward for such 
faith, he is bold, confident, and peaceful in his busi- 
ness. And he has his reward, and it is no mean 
one ; nay, it is a reward from God, — success in life, 
and respect from other men. We all know such 
men, and our hearts go out to their steady, quiet, 
cheerful working, based on the laws of God's uni- 
verse. Or turn to the student of natuns, diligent 
in finding out the laws of the universe ; meeting 
difficulties, perplexities, new problems, at every 
step, but always sure that there is some solution 
yet to come ; acknowledging that all is not plain, 
but sure that the course of nature will yet vindicate 
its reasonableness ; certain that there is such a 
thing as truth, which is perfectly consistent, and 
must prevail. Surely in all the history of man, there 
is no greater example of faith in a higher power, 
outside the pages of the Bible, than the advance of 
modern knowledge from step to step, amidst ene- 
mies and difficulties, untroubled because so be- 



Faith in God and in Christ, 79 

lieving. Better still, look at the moral life around 
us, — yes, even in one of our great cities, whose 
secrets of wickedness there is such a temptation 
to dwell upon with morbid curiosity. Remember 
that the more places of temptation, of dissipation, 
of intemperance, and of sin which there are in such 
a city, the more wonderful is the story of the thou- 
sands who, with natures to which all such temp- 
tations make their appeal, daily turn from them 
either with the disgust of genuine aversion, or with 
the struggle which evinces the existence of better 
and nobler aspirations. All such lives, making up 
the multitude of high and low, rich and poor, 
famous and nameless, which are all about us, tell 
of belief in a moral power which must not be 
offended, and which puts the restraint on passions 
and desires, which, let loose, in one short day would 
involve the world of men in destruction. There 
are moral and upright lives which are so without 
care and anxiety, because they thus believe in God. 
Why need wc shut our eyes to the good, to the 
courageous, the patient, the pure lives which are 
about us "i Leave to the cynical sneer of the 
doubter the denial of all honor and purity in man 
and woman. Let the believer in God be as anxious 
and eager in tracing His hand through every more 
or less conscious belief in Him, as he is in watch- 
ing His movements from the unconscious growth 



8o Faith in God and in Christ, 

of the plant to the heartfelt prayer of a Christian. 
He need have no more timidity in calling such 
facts of high and noble life belief in God than 
Christ had in dwelling upon the power and truth 
of the antecedent Judaism to which He brought a 
completing revelation. The same kind of belief 
which made Jewish history strong, makes all life 
strong about us to-day. It was often not a whit 
purer in some hero of the warring days of the Old 
Testament than it is in some man of upright 
and strenuous character to-day, to whom we are 
not allowed to give that name of personal Chris- 
tian any more than we are to that warring, blood- 
stained hero. Unbelief contradicts to-day one of 
the fundamental truths of modern knowledge, that 
all results have some sufficient cause, when it dares 
to say that the untruth of a personal belief in God, 
and the still further untruth of a belief in Christ, 
could have produced and maintained all the devel- 
opments of religious and Christian life which have 
blessed the world ever since it was inhabited by 
man. Such a claim refutes its right to a hearing. 
But such a fatal error warns us off the same path. 
We must not throw the manifestations of powerful 
life around us back on a falsehood as their source 
and strength. Such manifestations of powerful 
life mean a great deal ; emphasize them, challenge 
them, and encourage them everywhere, as things 



Faith in God and in Christ. 8i 

that are better than the earth. Do not be too 
anxious to call every careless non-Christian man 
an unbeliever, or every scientific man an atheist. 
What makes them all strong is a belief in God. 
That same belief in God which makes us lie down 
at night, never worrying as to whether the sun will 
rise, which makes us strong in a conviction of the 
regularity and lawfulness of life, must find its ex- 
pression in many ways through many minds ; and, 
wherever it appears, we may rejoice in it as the 
strongest and best foundation for action in every 
life. Any man whose experience in life has been 
at all varied is able to tell of the way in which 
new emergencies have brought new strength, and 
difficulties, in anticipation of which the heart 
fainted, have been found, on closer view, to have a 
much less terrifying aspect. And the result of all 
such experiences is to give to mature manhood and 
womanhood a certain calm power of going forward, 
which is a most necessary and satisfactory sub- 
stitute for the impetuous energy of youth. There 
is no deeper subject for thankfulness than the way 
in which God presses Himself on the knowledge 
and belief of men, even when they do not search 
for Him, or even desire Him. He shows that He 
has a Father's longing for them, even in their 
spurning of His presence ; they turn their backs 
upon Him, think only of themselves, go their own 



S2 Faith in God a7td in Christ, 

way, and, lo ! they have even then stumbled upon 
some characteristic or fact of life which is consist- 
ent only with the belief in a higher power. We 
find through all nature the anticipation of Christ, 
who came to men when they did not ask for Him, 
who died for men while they were yet sinners. 
As the Psalmist puts it grandly, " Thou hast 
beset me behind and before, and laid Thine hand 
upon me." Whatever strength, confidence, quiet, 
and calm there is to life, that we owe to the exist- 
ence and knowledge of our God. 

We surely have, therefore, as much right to use 
the first half of Christ's words as had those Jewish 
disciples to whom they were uttered. And we 
need not think or fear that the full appreciation 
of the existence and value of a belief in God will 
do away with the need of Christ, any more than 
Christ Himself feared the retort from those disci- 
ples, " If we believe in God, why should there be 
the need of any belief in you ? " He knew and 
they knew how often that belief in God in the 
course of the nation's history had seemed to fail. 
It had allowed rulers to grow hypocritical and for- 
mal ; it had left unlightened many a personal diffi- 
culty and doubt and trouble in the minds of the 
people of the nation. The very difficulty to which 
they then looked forward, the loss of their Master, 
was one to which it brought no relief. We can say 



Faith in God and in Christ. 



the same thing of that great general belief in God 
which so surrounds all human life as an atmo- 
sphere, that such life seems unable to escape from 
it, and which adds so much quiet and strength to 
life. There are personal sides to all life's troubles 
which it does not seem to touch. The very man, 
so strong in his business-life by reliance upon the 
laws of God, finds his position in life changed ; 
that business to which he has become accustomed 
drops from his hands. And how often a strange 
weakness in personal life shows itself ! There is 
no power to meet the new emergencies, there are 
anxiety and fretfulness where all before was calm 
and confidence; the man has got beyond the reve- 
lation of God which his business gave him, and he 
is lost, and therefore trouble has entered. It is the 
same with human knowledge : it has explained the 
movements of the heavenly bodies, and it stands be- 
side an open grave, and has not a word of explana- 
tion of the future, of all the activity and pomp that 
descends thither ; it traces back the developments 
of human and earthly existence, and it has not a 
word to say about the origin of that human soul 
which is the one valuable thing in life. It is the 
same with morality, w^hich is so valuable an ele- 
ment in all human life. The actions when no eye 
of man can see, the thoughts of the heart into 
which no other one can enter, — those are often 



84 Faith in God and in Christ, 

strangely at variance with what is recognized as 
the necessary and lawful and proper mode of action 
before men. The confessions of some of the 
world's purest characters, our knowledge of our 
own life, and of the secrets of our own con- 
sciences, and of the motives of our best actions, 
tell us that. Men who are calm over great things 
worry over little things; personal life is full of 
things which try the temper and trouble the soul, 
when in wider relations perfect calm and peace 
exist. And yet it is that sphere of personal life 
which is the closest and most important ; it is the 
state of that which determines the man's happi- 
ness or unhappiness ; it is by what goes on in 
that that the growth of character is determined. 
It is there that the troubles of life must really 
be killed. The overpowering and divine belief in 
God must be felt there also. If it is only by be- 
lief in Him and His laws that quiet and calm are 
gained elsewhere, it is only by the development 
of that belief that the troubles of that inner 
sphere can be touched. It is not by the ex- 
altation of self that the work can be done ; that 
would be an attempt to piece the robe of Divine 
majesty with a substance of mere human manufac- 
ture. Men try that, and you see the result in 
lives which in their public aspect are noble, and in 
their private lives are despicable ; men who are 



Faith in God and in Christ. 85 

honest in their business, and contemptible in their 
families ; men who are strong in their business, 
and self-conceited in all their personal bearing; 
men who have wide views of public questions, but 
whose views of their own lives and destinies are so 
vague that they cannot be at all expressed. God 
as the ruler of the earth is impressing Himself 
upon them every day, God as one close to their 
lives is lost sight of entirely. We see in this light 
the beauty of that conception of God which David 
had : " Who is like unto the Lord our God, who 
dwelleth on high, who humbleth Himself to behold 
the things that are in heaven and in the earth ! " 
That is the thought of God which is going to 
give calm, and to quiet the trouble of the heart in 
every form, for that covers all a man's life; that 
reaches to every corner alike of public and of pri- 
vate action ; that meets at once his great and his 
small difficulties. 

This, then, was the place that Christ offered to 
fill ; it was in the confidence of His ability to do so 
that He uttered these words : "Let not your heart 
be troubled : ye believe in God, believe also in me." 
We understand them when we see that they were 
intended to offer to a band of humble disciples, in 
their own hearts and lives, the comfort and strength 
of that God by whom "kings reign, and princes de- 
cree justice ; " of that God who *' maketh light and 



86 Faith in God and in Christ, 

createth darkness ; " of that God who " reacheth 
from one end to another mightily, and sweetly 
ordereth all things." It was a great claim, one 
which no man can make for himself or for any 
other, one which can belong only to Him who has 
within Himself the power of revealing God. How 
well the claim has been sustained, we can all of us 
know from the history of those same disciples, from 
the strong and steady growth of Christian character 
in knowledge of God, from the power which Christ 
has shown of solving questions of life and death in 
which all others have failed, and of relieving trou- 
bles for which no others could give any remedy. 
Personal allegiance to the Son of God extends into 
the sphere of individual destiny and action that 
same faith in a greater power, in an overruling 
hand, by which alone all that is good and strong in 
this world has ever been accomplished. It unites a 
man's public and private life, not by any artificial 
bond, but by the evidence that that same Father, 
without whom not a sparrow falleth to the ground, 
and by whom the grass of the field is clothed with 
beauty, has not neglected to speak to the hearts of 
His children in the only way in which they could be 
reached, by the loving voice of a personal Saviour ; 
it joins to science's discovery of the continuance 
and power of matter, that revelation of the immor- 
tality of the soul which could only be given by a 



Faith in God and in Christ. 8y 

living soul ; it adds to the belief in the necessity 
of goodness, the warmth of motive, for vi^ant of 
which morality is so often cold and unattractive ; 
it makes the infinity of detail in nature, which the 
microscope reveals to us, only a foretelling of God's 
knowledge and care for our smallest anxieties and 
troubles ; it makes the wondrous adaptations of the 
world about us, which we love to trace, the coun- 
terpart of those many mansions of the Father's 
house suited to all of us and to our various wants. 
It is this unity between God and Christ, this one- 
ness of life and Christianity, which is the salvation 
of both. Some man says, " Why am I always im- 
portuned to be a Christian ? I am no unbeliever. 
My life, my actions, are proof enough that I believe 
in God : what more can be wanted ? " Christ Him- 
self would take away no such claim ; He would deal 
with it as He did with the belief in God which sur- 
rounded Him in that Jewish nation : " Ye believe 
in God, believe also in me." He addressed it to 
every grade of belief; it was the trial which justi- 
fied or condemned. The young man who had kept 
the commandments from his youth up had the 
test put to him : " If thou wilt be perfect, come and 
follow me." The Jews, claiming God as their 
Father, heard from Jesus' lips the same test in 
the words, ** If God were your Father, ye would 
love me : for I proceeded forth and came from God." 



SS Failh in God and in Christ, 

To the disciples it was a word of comfort, and their 
strong faith in God gladly accepted the invitation 
to a rich extension ; it was a hard test to the young 
man, who went away sorrowful, and we know not 
the result ; it was a word of condemnation to the 
Jews, proving how all the strength of the knowl- 
edge of God had left them, and only the shell re- 
mained. The same test is submitted to men's ideas 
of their relation to God to-day. O moral, faithful, 
strong men ! why will you not always see that your 
view of God is never complete and consistent, un- 
less it takes also that knowledge of Him ia Jesus 
Christ, w^hich alone makes it a personal possession, 
brings it to bear on all the important matters of 
life and death which beset you as an individual, 
and lifts from your heart the troubles which are 
constantly arising.'* 

Or, if our belief is in Christ, and it seems as if 
that belief did not keep its promise in protecting 
the heart from trouble, may it not be because it 
does not speak to us forcibly enough of the su- 
premacy and power of God our Father in all our 
lives } All things are not submitted to Him : 
there are compromises with duty. His glory is not 
first in life : other powers besides His are relied 
upon for happiness and success. More strongly 
than ever Christ binds our life to the life of God. 
That is the means, the leading of men to the 



Faith in God and in Christ. 89 

Father, by which alone He would free men's 
hearts from trouble, and make them confident by 
the power of God. And so forever the key to all 
Christian life and joy is in the union of those 
words, " Ye believe in God, believe also in me." 
For all of us they open a way out of trouble, of 
whatever kind it is, because to all of us they tell 
of the infinite resources which are still before us 
in the knowledge of Him, who is our God for ever 
and ever, and who has come near to us in Jesus 
Christ. 



VII. 

THE PLAIN LIFE WITNESSING TO 
CHRIST. 

" And many resorted unto Him, and said, yohn did no miracle : 
hit ail things that John spake of this man were true^^ — John x. 41. 

JUST before Christ entered on those last stir- 
ring events of His life which were to culmi- 
nate in His death, He retired to the region beyond 
Jordan. It was a part of the nation which was 
but little affected by what went on elsewhere ; it 
was shut up to its own interests, and had little 
connection with the more active life of the times. 
Apparently Jesus had never been there before ; 
news of His doings had doubtless reached those 
people, but they knew very little of Him, and had 
never troubled themselves a great deal about His 
claims or His work. But there was something 
which gave interest to Him as He came among 
them. Two or three years before, John the Bap- 
tist had been there. He had drawn strangers of 
all kinds to the vicinity. The memory of his 
days was the glory of the region ; it had made it 

90 



The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 91 

famous. The inhabitants had treasured all the 
reminiscences of his words and actions. Every 
thing had been estimated in its relation to that 
event ; every new-comer had been compared to 
John. The excitement of those crowds that re- 
sorted to the Baptist had long ago passed away ; 
but we can all understand how his appearance and 
work were still the great event of that quiet re- 
gion, and the story of his doings and sayings was 
constantly told by one to another. Now, when 
Christ came, the first thought was to compare 
Him with John. Here was the very one whose 
coming John had predicted. Was He greater, or 
less, than John } Had John spoken the truth 
about Him } He was of importance, because 
John had spoken of Him ; He had a ready hear- 
ing because of that long-remembered visit of the 
Baptist. There is something very interesting in 
this dependence of Christ, as it were, upon the 
Baptist for a ready reception and hearing. This 
man, long dead, was still preparing the way for 
His coming. The lesser was opening the path for 
the greater, and making things smooth before 
Him. Who can tell how often that takes place ? 
how frequently some word or action, apparently 
unimportant, just serves to tone men's minds so 
that the way shall be ready for a great moral 
change .? Who can tell how often some uninflu- 



92 The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 

ential character, or some character whose pres- 
ence and influence seem very transitory, drops 
the seed for great things that are to come ? It is 
a great encouragement. It multiplies the impor- 
tance of action many fold. It tells us to go 
through the world feeling that not far behind us 
there may be a power which is depending upon 
our faithful action. If we fail, and consider duty 
small and unimportant, be may come, and his 
whole work be lost on account of our unfaithful- 
ness in something that seemed of little impor- 
tance. Our little footsteps may be the track of a 
much greater power, and in that confidence we 
can put down our feet firmly. And then see what 
Christ did for John and his memory. His work 
was becoming distant ; it was gradually becoming 
a thing of the past. When Christ came into that 
region, He brushed away all marks of oldness that 
were accumulating on it. At once it was a fresh 
thing. Men recalled what he said and did, and 
John was again a vital power in that place. It 
was a reviving power to have Christ come thus. 
There is a great pleasure in coming across the 
marks of a man's work after he is gone, in sud- 
denly having the impression of his work repro- 
duced with greater vividness "than ever. It makes 
us understand something of the meaning of immor- 
tality. He who can produce such an effect is a 



The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 93 

great blessing to mankind. He who comes, and 
not only works himself, but stirs up all the good 
work that has gone before, brings it out to the 
light, carries it out to its proper end, and makes 
it genuinely useful, — he is the one who is an 
effective power in the world. He gives immor- 
tality ; he makes men live forever, and is felt 
everywhere as a life-giving power. He is the 
most unselfish, at the same time that he is the 
greatest power. It was this which Jesus did 
wherever He went. He was not a selfish power, 
separating Himself from all others, declaring 
Himself alone ; but, wherever He went, the good 
influences of the past gathered round Him, and 
gave Him new light, as He gave to them new 
power. 

And so in this relation between the dead John 
Baptist and the living Christ we have the whole 
subject of the true work of a man's life, and of 
the best and most lasting work that a man can do, 
put before us. John the Baptist lived in Christ, 
and it were well for us to understand how he did 
so. In the first place, there was a tone of disap- 
pointment in the feeling of those people about 
their hero. John did no miracle. Doubtless the 
same disappointment had been in their minds dur- 
ing his lifetime. He had drawn multitudes to that 
desert region ; his teaching had been pure and 



94 T^^^ Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 

noble, his character had been unselfish and ear- 
nest ; he had started a great moral reformation. 
But John did no miracle. They had looked for 
that miracle day after day, and it had not come; 
and at last they had been compelled to settle 
down to the conviction that he was subject to the 
common laws of life, like other men. They would 
not give him up, but they were disappointed. 
Can we not understand the feeling, from our expe- 
rience with ourselves or with others ? How often 
we have looked at some man in public life, and 
expected that he was going to do great things ! 
We did not quite see how, but, now that he was on 
the stage, things were to change ; new times were 
to come, old forces pass away, and new things 
take their place ; miracles were to be worked. 
How many a parent has looked at his child with 
something of the feeling that Eve had when she 
exclaimed, at the birth of Cain, that she had 
gotten a man from the Lord, — a man who would 
do great things ; a man who, by the spirit within 
him, would defy the hard events about him, and 
turn them into something better ! The parent 
knows that he himself is nothing wonderful ; but 
he magnifies all that the child does, and tries to 
make out that he is a phenomenon. And I sup- 
pose, that, with regard to ourselves, we can all re- 
member the time when it seemed as if no difBcul- 



The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 95 

ties could stand before us, and we felt that it was 
not so hard a work to do miracles, and to change 
things for the better, if only one true-hearted man 
would be in earnest about it. And then has come 
the conviction, that, after all, there is an order of 
things that is beyond man's reach. Our new re- 
formers have disappointed us ; each new genera- 
tion has grown up and passed away without work- 
ing the great visible change ; and we ourselves 
have felt the tightening cords of circumstance and 
law drawing round our energy, and binding our 
activity to a certain round and course of action. 
Over and over again we have to drop some picture 
of great changes from our minds, and say that we 
must be satisfied with things as they are. We 
could hardly count the men to-day that are going 
their way, — heads of families, plain men of busi- 
ness, — who once would have spurned any such idea 
of the confinement of life's energies from their 
minds, who saw a track reaching into unknown 
regions, instead of going just where all other men 
had gone before them. And yet there is some- 
thing very inspiring in seeing that the belief of 
men in the miracle-worker still continues ; they 
still look out for him, after all disappointment. 
They refuse to believe that things are always to 
continue as they are ; they will constantly be be- 
lieving in this man or this plan, which is going 



96 The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ 

to work wonders, and accomplish what has never 
been done before. It is man's great power of 
hope, and his undying conviction that there is 
something above and beyond him, that will yet 
rescue him from all that is hard and difficult. If 
it is disappointed, it need not be ashamed. If 
John the Baptist does not perform miracles, at 
least it is better to have looked for great things, 
strong in the conviction that they would come, 
than not to have expected any thing. 

And now what is there to take the place of 
this desire for miracles when it has been disap- 
pointed.'* We must have something; for it is 
only too easy to settle down, perfectly satisfied 
with our life as it is, and to ask for no more than 
the common life of routine and regular action, 
since we seem to be confined to that. Some there 
are that have met some tangible disappointment. 
They had a definite hope of great things, and it 
faded away ; and now they are not going to at- 
tempt any thing more : they are going to make 
the best of life as it is, and be satisfied with 
that. Others there are who, without any such 
definite thought, looking for something great 
which was to come, and not finding it, are going 
along from day to day, perfectly content with 
what every day brings, feeling, that, if they cannot 
be heroes, they can at least draw back into them- 



The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ 97 

selves, letting thing go on, and carry them with 
them. It is the story of many a life, which, de- 
spairing of any thing beyond this world, lets this 
present world's life confine all its thoughts. 
What is the use of any thing more ? it says. 
There is no definite object of exertion beyond the 
present moment. A new view of life is sadly 
wanted, that shall take the place of the old one» 
and save the life from becoming commonplace ; 
and that one thing is, to labor to find out and to 
tell the truth about this life about us, to speak it 
so that men shall hear. If we are not original 
sources of power, if we cannot change things 
about us by any miracle-working power, at least 
let us bear witness to the truth, even though it may 
not always be the easiest thing to do in life. That 
is the struggle of character and of right action. 
It is not as fascinating as the prospect of miracle- 
working, but it is more truly ours, and it is as 
effective. Man's work is to show the best side of 
every thing here, — to show it in word and in act. 
That is the new struggle, that is to fill the void 
made by any disappointment or by any disappoint- 
ing view of life. It is to drive out of sight all the 
dull, cynical spirit which takes things as they are 
and makes the best of them, and looks no farther. 
All things have two sides, — their true and their 
false. We are holding them up in one or the 



(gS The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 

'Other to men. We are by our actions making them 
'mere sources of pleasure and of profit, or we are 
rshowing that they have deeper uses that God has 
given them. Time, money, opportunities, social 
relations, all the surroundings of a plain life, all 
the commonplace facts of life which are to be 
found in every man's life in greater or less degree, 
-— - how are we regarding them } What are we tell- 
ing men about them .? Have we found out the 
truth as to them } and are we exhibiting that 
truth about them to men, or are we holding to 
'them just as is convenient, and telling of them as 
such to men, and giving our false, worldly ideas of 
them } This is the basis of all moral exertion, of 
all true action. It is the greatest work a man can 
.do. W^ can work no miracle, but the expression 
.as to the true side of every thing can find its way 
iinto the world through us ; it can come in no other 
vway. It is men's work so to do every thing and to 
:use every thing, that all shall come out in new 
power. In that view of life arises a new line of 
ambitions, which can arouse all energy, and nerve 
a man as no other work ever did. Men will value 
such work and treasure it. They will gladly see 
that such work, natural and true as it is, is greater 
than performing miracles. It leads into the thick 
of life, not to the solitariness of miracle-working. 
John the Baptist did such work, and men followed 



The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ 99 

him out into the wilderness to hear him ; the ex- 
citement that he stirred continued long on the 
banks of the Jordan. Into it he threw all his life ; 
and from the knowledge of him many a soldier 
went back to his work and wages, many a publi- 
can to his tax-gathering, many a private person 
to his common life, with a better idea of their 
duties, as the sins of life and the great hopes 
of life had been set before them with the forcible 
power of John's teaching of the truth. They 
brought back the memory of no miracle, but they 
brought back something better, — a determination 
to get at the truth of their life, and not use it 
wrongly. Oh, plain life, just as it is, is full of 
riches ! He who believes that, and never gives up 
the search for them, shall be rewarded by doing 
a great work. Use it rightly, not slothfully and 
just for personal ease, and it shall be found to 
have great things in it ; and no man need be a 
failure here. 

As these men looked back at their hero's words, 
they found that they had largely been about Christ, 
who had now come among them, and that all that 
he had told them about this One, who was to come, 
had been true. He had pointed to Him as the 
Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the 
world; he had told of all the purity that should 
be found in His character ; he had predicted that 



100 The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 

He should increase, while John himself should de- 
crease. All this had proved true, and thus John 
had lived again in the appearance of Christ. The 
truth which he had told had centred in Christ : that 
had been John's power. He had told those men 
the truth about their lives ; but, above all, he had 
told of the great One that was to come. Witness 
to moral truth, to truth about God and His power, 
is the greatest thing a man can give. Men want 
truth on every subject, — they call out for the right 
side everywhere ; but all that we bring is useless, 
unless we can tell them something about them- 
selves, unless we can bear witness to some power 
that can rescue life. There is where all that de- 
mand for miracles finds its satisfaction. Men will 
have them. John did no miracles, but he told of 
Christ, that did ; and all that he told of Christ was 
true. And so, placing our own lives beside John 
Baptist's again, I think that we can perceive what a 
power the knowledge of Christ gives to a man. It 
gives him something of which to tell, wherever he 
goes ; it puts within his own knowledge a power 
which he can reach out to others. It comes to a 
plain life that is settling down, and feeling that it 
had better give itself up to the routine of life, and 
filling it with nobler aspirations, and telling it of 
God's friendship and love, inspires it to go out and 
tell of them to other men, to bear witness to the 



The Plain Life Witnessing to C lyrist. loi 

truth. It is a work right in the line of all life's 
best work, as we have seen ; it is giving us the 
truth in a shape by means of which we can get an 
understanding of it in our hearts, so as to bear wit- 
ness to it. With the conviction of a John Baptist 
that a power has come to the world that will lay 
the axe to the root of the trees, that there stands 
in the world One who can baptize men with the 
Holy Ghost and with fire, what a work the plainest 
life could do ! It could leave the miracles all to 
Him, and it could content itself with showing forth 
His power, so that men could see it and believe. 
Such a life would live ; every new visit of this 
power to which it had borne witness would find the 
traces of such a man's work. All Christian work 
would feel its influence, and glorify such a man who 
had told the truth about such a Saviour. That is 
the power of a genuinely Christian life. It is possi- 
ble for all men : each man can take up his common 
life and make it speak for Christ, as it is filled with 
the conviction of His power and authority. We 
say that the day of miracles has passed. And we 
do not look for prophets with a wonder-working 
power to come among us. We have learned to be 
satisfied with our John the Baptists without mira- 
cles, and not be disappointed, as those men were, 
when they come without them. It is a much bet- 
ter position ; it makes it much more possible for 



102 Tloe Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 

men to be prophets. And can we not go farther, 
and say that there has been a very great raising 
of common hfe, which makes it harder for men to 
rise above it, and to soar into exceptional promi- 
nence, than it used to be ? But cannot all this 
glory of common life be traced to the fact that 
every man can be inspired with the thought of 
his calling in the Lord Jesus ? Every man is a 
prophet to-day who is telling of the power of God 
in his life. The plain life witnessing for Christ is 
the type of true action among us. How many of 
us can tell of the fact that some man or woman, 
going his regular course of duty, has spoken true 
words as to the power of Jesus of Nazareth, which 
have blessed us ! We want to get the true idea of 
God in our lives as the real spirit of Christianity. 
It was just beginning to dawn on the minds of 
those men that lived be}^ond the Jordan : they 
began to understand John's greatness. But it was 
Christ's work to make the world feel it, and it has 
been growing ever since. 

And yet let us never think that Christianity and 
telling of Christ are incompatible with the highest 
stretches of human power. Let the man rise who 
can do miracles, let the greatest genius break 
forth, and still it can follow Christ. He dwarfs 
no man ; He makes no man feel that any action is 
too high if he feels called to it within himself. 



The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ. 103 

For Christ came to change all things, to work 
miracles by His power on the earth. He has ever 
done so ; He has shown all power in Himself : and 
the greatest of human powers can find a place for 
its efforts in His work. There is a depth of truth 
in Him which the greatest minds can devote them- 
selves to finding out and declaring. He gives 
truth to the man of power, and it is that which 
is wanted for every man. We want no miracle- 
worker who does not tell of the truth. Bad will 
it be for the world when it is granted that Christ 
is but for common minds. He has inspired the 
greatest minds; He has drawn to Himself the 
boldest workers. The few rare minds can find 
abundant material in Him, who has the whole 
knowledge and power of life within Himself. But 
for the great number of men He can do a work 
which no other can, — ennoble all life, and give 
them a truth to declare which they can find no- 
where else. All can stand close in Him, and go 
through the world leaving in our lives marks of 
Him, which others shall recognize, and declare 
to be the best and truest fruits of life. 'This 
fact of the power of witnessing for Christ is the 
pledge of immortality. It is the fact of the resur- 
rection present to-day. How living and natural 
to us to-day is the expression of a Christian faith 
uttered years ago ! How many will live hereafter 



104 'The Plain Life Witnessing to Christ, 

who have done no great works here, but have 
uttered true words about Christ ! To do that, 
is to have the power of an endless Hfe, and to 
pour into daily action that which shall make it 
eternal. 



VIII. 

THE SIFTING OF LIFE. 

" And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired 
to have you, that he may sift you as wheat : but I have prayed for 
thee, that thy faith fail not : and when thou ai't converted, strengthen 
thy brethren^ — Luke xxii. 31, 32. 

THE figure which Christ here makes use of in 
order to describe the severe ordeal through 
which Peter, the most prominent of all the dis- 
ciples, was to pass, is a very significant one ; and 
we cannot believe that it was used by chance, or 
without full intention. The sifting of wheat is a 
most hard and thorough, but a most necessary, 
process. The wheat, as it has grown, has become 
associated with the protecting chaff, which it is 
necessary should be blown away, and with the for- 
eign substances taken from the earth and from the 
air, which must be separated. Before the wheat is 
ready for use, it must be sifted or winnowed ; no 
pains must be spared to make the process as thor- 
ough as possible. Only an enemy to the wheat, 
or a disbeliever in its true powers, would desire to 

spare it such an ordeal. As it falls, after such a 

105 



io6 The Sifting of Life. 

process, into the receptacle which has been pre- 
pared for it, solid and clean, its value is greatly 
enhanced. There is now no doubt about its true 
nature and the work to which it should be put. 
It carries out all the points of the analogy to notice 
that Peter is not promised that he shall be saved 
from the sifting process : no hand is put forth to 
hold him securely sheltered ; no cloud wraps him 
away from danger. Peter is too valuable to be 
thus treated. If he is wheat, he must be sifted. 

And so we learn the great lesson from Christ, 
that difficulties are as necessary and beneficial 
for the soul as winnowing is for the wheat. The 
winds of temptation blow, and the poor, lightly 
weighted souls are carried away ; while the strong 
ones are stripped of many things in which they 
trusted, and the true power of principle becomes 
more evident in their lives. Take a number 
of children growing up together, follow them 
through their lives, and see how, one after another, 
they drop out under the processes to which they 
are subjected. The need of application tests the 
physical constitution which their parents have 
given them ; the demand for clearness of mind, 
restraint of appetite, firmness of principle, tells of 
the nature of the family training which is being 
given them ; and the temptations to small sins, 
petty, foolish, conceited ways, and even to vicious 



The Sifting of Life. 107 

courses, asks as to the principle which from the 
earliest days has inspired their souls. A school, 
a college, a professional training, make up a great 
winnowing place through which cross-winds are 
ever blowing ; and at the end of the process you 
look for your number of pure grains of wheat, and 
they are few, indeed, compared to the size of the 
great aggregate on which the work first began. 
And still, under fiercer winds of temptation, which 
men and women of the world well know, the 
question of the winnowing floor is always being 
repeated : Are you wheat, or chaff ? There is the 
sifting of change of position, the pouring from 
vessel to vessel, — a process under which the light 
grains are removed, and which finds its parallel in 
the change of life's demands. You are rich, and 
the question the next day is, Can you stand 
poverty } or you are poor, and the sudden access of 
prosperity tests your real ability and weight. Will 
the one rob you of your spirit, or the other of your 
humility.-* If they will, then you have been sifted 
with the result of proving that you are but chaff. 
Changes from joy to sorrow or from sorrow to joy, 
from light to dark or from dark to light, — those 
have revealed the substance of many a man to 
us ; and we have said, " I thought that he could 
stand it better," or we have exclaimed, *' What a 
noble man he is ! He is just as he was before, not 



TioS ne Sifting of Life. 

•puffed up by his exaltation, not broken by dejec- 
1:ion." And there is the sifting of progress : ideas 
;and men all pass through that. New tests are 
;applied, just as ever new sieves, with closer and 
.closer meshes, wait for the falling grain, with 
sharper discrimination at each stage of the process. 
The truth of one generation or one age of life is 
;sifted before it is accepted by the next. Some 
.accretion, some profitless protecting husk, is cast 
■off, and the substance is more valuable than ever. 
The man finds, after life's experience, that not one 
■particle of the truth as to honesty, virtue, and 
'God has proved itself false, although he smiles at 
the childish conceptions which enshrined it for 
ihim, and which long ago passed away ; and with 
-each generation God's truth is made simpler and 
^clearer to the eyes of all. So in this life of ours the 
;great sifting process progresses. Life is one great 
:machine, combining, like some of the winnowing 
^inventions of modern times, every contrivance 
which shall separate the chaff from the wheat. 
What Christ said to Simon, modern knowledge has 
formalized in that phrase with which it would 
cover all action and all progress, — '' natural selec- 
tion," "the survival of the fittest." The most 
active and prominent, the Simon Peters, are most 
exposed to it ; the battle rages around them most 
fiercely. They will be winnowed, sifted, poured, 



The Sifting of Life. 109 

and shaken most persistently ; to them the tests of 
body, mind, and soul will be most rigorously ap- 
plied. But all must meet it ; the fact stares all in 
life, that the sifting process is a reality, and for it 
preparation must be made. 

But what has Satan to do with it ? If it is a 
process universal in life, and belonging to man 
as made by God, how could Christ say that Satan 
desired to have Simon, that he might sift him as 
wheat.'' Satan rejoiced at the anticipation of this 
process, and longed to see it begin, because he 
did not believe that Peter could stand it ; he does 
not believe that any man can, and he longs, there- 
fore, to see men come under the test. So Satan 
thought in the Old Testament regarding Job, 
when his righteousness was displayed to him ; 
and his faithless sneer, '* Doth Job fear God for 
nought .-*" has been repeated many times. He is 
the supreme cynic ; and wherever you find the 
man who is doing Satan's work, very soon you 
can perceive this disbelief in the existence of 
disinterested honestv and virtue alike in man and 
in woman. There is in such souls a supreme con- 
viction in the power of this sifting process to dis- 
sipate all pretences to virtue. Let the sifting be 
thorough enough, and all good will disappear from 
the heart of man. The processes used will be 
the ordinary ones of life. When Satan tried Job, 



no The Sifting of Life. 

it was the bands of the Sabeans and Chaldeans, 
it was the lightning from heaven, the winds from 
the wilderness, the diseases of the body, which he 
made use of for his instruments. It was material 
pitted against spirit, it was the outer against the 
inner; and the great enemy of man never doubted 
for a moment but that the former, the material 
and the outer, must prevail. All sense of the 
power of the latter, the spiritual and the inner, 
had passed away from him, and so it has always 
from the powers of evil. In that material and 
outward they live, on it they rely, and by it they 
war. At first it seems to give evil the advantage, 
for it puts all this universal sifting process appar- 
ently on its side. But the meaning of those words 
of Christ's gradually comes out : " Fear not them 
that kill the body, and after that have no more 
that they can do." The sifting is to be endured 
boldly and fearlessly, because there is an ultimate 
kernel of life which it cannot touch. It is a real- 
ity, which defies all the processes of ultimate solu- 
tion that can be brought against it. That is the 
belief which makes a man strong to endure temp- 
tation, brave to pass through all changes, cour- 
ageous to march with all progress of ideas. It was 
to the soul that Christ spoke; on it all His work 
was based. When He had once seen that soul 
conscious of itself and of its power in the heart 



The Sifting of Life. 1 1 1 

of a man, He was not afraid to let the world sift 
him, even though he might be a man with as many 
weaknesses and foibles as Simon Peter. Let 
them be shaken off and blown away, like corrupt- 
ing substances or infolding chaff. When that 
was all done, the man remained. 

It is Christ and His Gospel that believes in 
manhood, and is not afraid of the effect of life 
upon the true wheat. It says, " Let the process 
even go so far as to reach the very destruction of 
the body itself, there is no more to fear ; even 
that which seems to human eyes to be a very 
necessity of life, even that is only chaff, protect- 
ing for a time, but in due time to be cast aside, 
that the man may live a better and larger life.'* 
I know no better illustration of this than the very 
relation which Christian activity and philanthropy 
hold to the modern formalized doctrine of natural 
selection. That doctrine would say, *' Let the 
weak die, let the strongest survive ; it is a provi- 
dential arrangement that it should be so, with 
which you should not interfere. Whatever has 
shown, by weakness of body or mind or spirit, its 
inability to live, ought not to live, had better not 
live, for its own sake and for the sake of the 
world." Christian philosophy grants the neces- 
sity, the advantage, of the sifting process ; but it 
sees the wheat and its separation as the object of 



1 1 2 The Sifting of Life. 

it all. It says that help can be brought to that; 
that there, in the kernel of the human heart, is 
where the process can be influenced ; that there 
is where man differs from all others in the condi- 
tions of this sifting. And so it takes the discour- 
aged and weakened soul, which the world cannot 
use, and is fast killing, and speaks to it words of 
comfort, and tells it of the object of all this sift- 
ing. If it is too late to give it the ability to be 
useful here, it can prepare it for the gathering into 
the Master's garner at last. It opens the doors 
of its hospitals and asylums to the sick and the 
miserable and the aged, and shields them for a 
time from the process of destruction, so that the 
soul within may be made strong to endure, and 
may learn that it cannot be killed. It takes the 
puny, sickly infant, and keeps alive the faint spark 
of life within it, so that it may do the work for 
which God placed it here, even though it be by a 
life of deprivation and of suffering. It tells the 
drunkard, whom the world despises, of the great- 
ness of his soul, and of the love of the Saviour 
who died to save it ; it reclaims, by a message of 
purity and salvation, the prisoner whom society 
has marked as dangerous, and as one to be re- 
strained, if not even destroyed. Satan, by all these 
sifting processes, is claiming these victims as his 
own, through despair, through ignorance, through 



The Sifting of Life. 1 1 3 

crime ; the voice within joins with the voice without 
in saying that there is no hope. What life gives, 
the soul must take without any power of appeal. 
Life is but a process of judgment, — of approval to 
some, and of condemnation to others ; of sifting, 
when the light weights must perish, and only the 
happy few — if even there be any such, as evil is 
always maliciously suggesting there are not — 
survive. But by its revelation of the power of 
men's souls, and by its words of encouragement 
and help, the Gospel of Christ declares that to 
the very centre of the struggle a saving hand can 
come at all times. It is the world, it is daily life, 
it is Satan, that speak of judgment and condem- 
nation : it is the Gospel of Christ that tells of 
progress and salvation. 

I think, then, that we can understand that tone 
of confidence with which Jesus speaks of the trial 
which is to befall His great disciple. To His eye 
the conditions are not hopeless. He does not 
deprecate the struggle, but rather in it anticipates 
the defeat of Satan. But the tone of confidence 
is still more sublime when the means of strength 
and victory are considered. The whole of the sift- 
ing process administered by its great master and 
confident authority, Satan, is to be brought to 
bear ; and yet Peter will not succumb, because 
Christ has prayed for him, that his faith fail not. 



114 The Sifting of Life. 

See how Christ puts Himself against the world. 
Through that prayer the life of Peter was made 
strong to bear the ordeal ; through that prayer he 
was able to defy the world and Satan. Think 
what Jesus' prayer for Peter must have meant. 
Jesus was the Saviour for all men. Doubtless in 
those prayers, which on the mountain, and before 
the dawn, and after days of restless labor, He of- 
fered to His Father, all the disciples, nay, all man- 
kind, were remembered. But this prayer which He 
offered for one of the first of His disciples ; one 
who had joined Him at the very opening of His 
ministry, when as yet no miracle had attested His 
power, and no fame had drawn multitudes to Him ; 
one who, with all his weaknesses and failings, had 
stood firm when others faltered, and had declared, 
*'Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words 
of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that 
Thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God," 
— this prayer told of the relation which He had 
established between that disciple for whom the 
prayer was offered, and that Father to whom it 
was offered. He stood between the two. He 
doubted not that He was the Master of the one 
and the well-beloved Son of the other : both had 
acknowledged Him and their connection with 
Him ; the one speaking from the earth, and the 
other from heaven. Through Him to that human 



The Sifting of Life. 1 1 5 

sou], tried, tempted, sifted, the strength of its God 
had flowed; through Him to the Father in heaven, 
loving, forgiving, sympathizing, and longing to 
save, the allegiance of that child of His had been 
given. The conditions were perfect : the subject, 
the offerer, the receiver of the prayer, were one in 
their purpose and desire to overcome and baffle 
Satan. There could be no doubt as to the answer 
to the prayer and the issue of the conflict. From 
God the necessary renewal to the tried faith must 
come, and at once Christ's mind flies to the suc- 
cessful conclusion: ''When thou art converted, 
strengthen thy brethren." 

Such a prayer was the expression of Christ's 
personal mission and power. He would offer it 
for every man as he is exposed to the sifting of 
life. It is based upon His power to reveal to 
men's hearts their relation to God, and God's love 
to them. Whoever receives those, whoever ac- 
cepts Christ in that position, has had opened to 
him a source of strength with which he may defy 
Satan and the world. This is the Divine natural 
selection. Men are put here to be tried ; it is a 
question as to how the ordeal of life will be sus- 
tained, but the decision rests with each man. 
In a struggle, whose intensity constantly dismays 
us, striving with issues of eternal life and death, he 
alone will succeed who looks to God for help. In 



ii6 The Sifting of Life. 

that search a way of life has been opened that 
speaks to men with a plainness and directness 
that belongs to no other voice ; where other things 
multiply material forces, this one tells of the power 
of the soul, and of its protection by God. He 
who hears that voice is the one that will be saved ; 
he is the one who will have strength to endure all 
the sifting of life, and to come out of it stronger 
and better. Give to yourself every other help in 
life's battle, but do not neglect to seek this great- 
est one, which concerns a man above all others. 
You may escape the other dangers of life ; but to 
be free from the greatest one of life's sifting, this 
refuge and strength is needed. The health, the 
wealth, the learning, the cultivation, the friend- 
ship, with which you seek to be among the world's 
successful men and women, and to escape destruc- 
tion, may do their work, and yet may be the very 
means of helping on what they are intended to 
avoid, unless the kernel of the wheat is strong 
and solid by the knowledge of God through Jesus 
Christ. That is the conversion which is needed. 
Men stumble over the word, and wonder what it 
means ; but is it not clear in the light of our text 
which contains it, *'When once thou hast turned 
again, stablish thy brethren " ? It is to turn from 
all else to the real centre of human life. It is to 
make wheat wheat, and nothing else ; it is to make 



The Sifting of Life. 1 1 7 

a man a man, and nothing else. It is to exalt 
that, by reason of which no ordeal, either of life 
or death, shall ever dismay or overcome him. 

We are not alone in this sifting process. This 
great winnowing life holds men and women and 
children all alike in its relentless grasp. Our 
hearts are tried time and time again by little 
glimpses of the tragedies which are going on in 
the lives about us. The struggles with poverty, 
the fight against temptation of young lives which 
are vory close to us in the world, the ordeals which 
lie before all men and women between the cradle 
and grave, — those bewilder us with the possibili- 
ties of good and evil which they contain. How 
shall we help these antagonists of evil ? They 
must fight their own battles ; no parent, or friend, 
or benefactor can, by a sheltering arm, draw them 
out of the struggle : and, if they are wise, they will 
not do so, any more than Christ would pray that 
Peter should not be tempted. You may encour- 
age, you may exhort, you may advise ; all such help 
is good, but it is on the surface : and the winnowing 
process goes on ; and, if there is not strength in that 
kernel of human wheat, it will not be able to stand 
the ordeal. No revelation from experience as to 
the secrets of the winnowing machine can save 
from the effect of its work. And who knows the 
secret of another's experience 1 Who can tell 



ii8 The Sifting of Life. 

what others have to meet, and pretend to say how 
they shall do it ? Your work, which you long to 
do for others, must make them strong to do their 
own work. Through you must flow into them that 
which shall tell them of real power, able to with- 
stand any ordeal. You will be able to strengthen 
your brethren when you are converted yourself. 
Your knowledge of God will give you a sympathy 
with every brother's trial, and a power to help 
every brother's soul. Jesus joins His help and 
Peter's help together. With rarest love and con- 
descension He lifts him up to be a laborer with 
Himself. His prayer for Peter, doing its work 
on him, makes him able to do a work for others. 
Power multiplies itself. There is no reason why 
every man should not baffle Satan, not only as re- 
gards his own soul's salvation, but also as regards 
that of all to whom his influence flows, and leave 
him, after all his attempts, a poor, discomfited 
power of evil, compelled to believe in the existence 
of a power of goodness which he has all the time 
been despising. So he failed with Christ in the 
wilderness, and He who thus resisted became 
the Captain of our salvation ; so, under Him, we 
who resist, strong in the Lord and in the power of 
His might, shall help many to the success in life's 
struggle which is the object and the duty of all 
men. 



IX. 

HOPEFULNESS THROUGH CHRIST. 

^^ He said unto them. Give place : for the maid is not dead, but 
sleepeth. And they laughed him to scornJ^ — Matthew ix. 24. 

IN any life of real power, there are unexpected 
occasions when the real principle of its exist- 
ence flashes out with startling vividness. Such an 
occasion is often produced by opposition. The 
force within feels the obstacle to its manifestation, 
and has nothing to do but to declare itself, so that 
all shall really understand what it intends. The 
sight of an act of cruelty sometimes wrings a cry 
of pity from some man whose words about kind- 
ness have never impressed us half so vividly. It 
seems to have been so with Jesus in this case. 
He had, in obedience to the summons of the 
father, gone to the centurion's house to heal his 
daughter. On His way He had been hindered by 
the message that the girl was dead, and therefore 
that there was no need of His proceeding farther. 
Putting that obstacle aside by encouraging words 
to the parent. He had reached the house ; and there 

119 



120 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

the sight and sound of the mourning friends and 
of the hired minstrels so brought home to Him the 
hopelessness of all their thoughts and actions that 
He expresses in the strongest way His own hope- 
fulness. To Him that dead girl was already alive. 
He felt within Him His own power ; and, defying 
their scornful laughter, He declares, " She is not 
dead, but sleepeth." 

There is no greater proof of real living power 
than this ability — nay, this necessity, as it seems 
to have been here — of declaring itself in the very 
midst of most opposing circumstances. Weak 
determination and uncertain power hesitate be- 
fore an array of contrary opinion ; it doubts its 
own existence ; it is discouraged and timid as to 
its own extent. But the true hero, the worker who 
feels what he can do, rejoices at the emergency; 
he leaps forward to meet it, and sees the moment 
of genuine contradiction as one when no com- 
promises can be allowed, and no doubts harbored. 
To know just when to give battle, to be able to 
say to the enemy, '* You shall go no farther ; 
here you must fight," — that is the mark of the 
great general. And this scene of Jesus' meeting, 
with His strongest declaration, the utter disbelief 
of men, is one which, repeated as it -was more than 
once in the Gospels, tells us that He is the truest 
leader for any man's life. When times are dark- 



Hopefulness Through Christ 121 

est, His confidence will show most brightly. This 
reserve power is always in Christ, because what 
He does comes from the very being of God. In 
moments of easy quiet and untempted life we are 
inclined to doubt its existence, and almost with 
alarm we look forward to the possibilities of evil 
that may assail us at any moment. Then the re- 
membrance of this true giant-power, which He had, 
of asserting Himself when most needed, can be the 
encouragement to draw closer to His strength, sure 
that, when the darkest moments come, we shall 
learn more of Him and of His possibilities than 
we have ever known before. For men who never 
know what is before them, for men who know 
that there is certainly one great mysterious ordeal 
of death before them, surely that is just the Sav- 
iour that is wanted. 

But it is the special feature of the contrast 
which this self-assertion of Christ under opposi- 
tion brought out, to which we turn our atten- 
tion. It was hopefulness against hopelessness. 
The mourning of parents, the wailing of friends, 
the dirges of hired minstrels, all meant that the 
girl w^as dead, and that there was no hope of any 
thing further. That fact seemed undeniable, and 
on that supposition they were all doing the best 
that they could. Only one man thought differ- 
ently, and at once felt that new action was de- 



122 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

manded. To Him all was hopeful; there was still 
life ; the mourning and the music must cease, and 
in the strong prospect of the future the spirit of 
that house must change. Hope and despair, that 
battle which rages in every man's breast, and in 
all the world, was fought out in that house. Jesus 
was on one side, and all the others, with their tra- 
ditional views and actions, were on the other. 
And Jesus conquered. 

It is this hopeful side of life on which Jesus is 
always to be found, and He always has the world 
against Him. It is not a despairing world; mourn- 
ing and dirges are not the only sounds that fill the 
world, as they did that house. But despairing and 
mournful action is not the only method by which 
hopelessness expresses itself. That is a feature of 
the case here, which arises only from the nature 
of the occasion. But take men's pleasure and 
their business, and how often the reason given for 
them has this strain of hopelessness in it ! " Let 
me enjoy myself now," says the young man ©r 
woman : ''I shall only be young once." The ap- 
proach of age is not felt ; it is not real enough to 
cause any sorrow or mourning. But there is just 
that impression, that life is advancing towards 
something disagreeable, and that affects all action. 
A man works very hard, and you ask him why, and 
he says that he must have something to leave to 



Hopefulness Through Christ. , 123 

his children. He knows not what may be in store 
of trouble rind difficulty for him ; he knows not how 
soon he may die. "Life is short" are the words 
which nerve many a man, in health as well as in 
disease. It inspires much of the rush and hurry 
of life ; and all the tumult about us may be com- 
pared to those minstrels making a noise, whose 
only inspiration was the fact of death. What is 
the source of our grumbling and our disappoint- 
ment but the feeling that we are losing some happy 
moments in a life where they are only too few } 
We exalt material possessions above the attain- 
ment of character. The man who turns his back 
upon some advantageous opportunity or pursuit, 
because it would lower his tone of thought, or de- 
grade his standard of action, seems to the world 
quixotic and dreamy. He evidently has some 
idea of the future uses and the permanent posses- 
sion of lofty thought and correct standards of 
character which the hopelessness of the world 
does not allow it to appreciate. It sees no place 
where such character can be used but right here 
and now ; and, knowing that it will not feed or 
clothe a man, it says, -*0h, yes, character is good; 
but you must not sacrifice too much for it. You 
want it, but you want something else with it." 
Hear men's arguments for virtue ! How they 
harp on expediency, drawing together examples 



124 Hopefulness Through Christ, 

of successful men, and showing how they have 
been virtuous, and asking of this world a letter of 
indorsement for that which ought to be based on 
eternal principles, and which would live if the world 
perished to-morrow ! In these features our life 
corresponds to that roomful of mourners and min- 
strels which Jesus found in the centurion's house. 
Our tone may be different, our inspiration is the 
same. And all that is to be changed ; it is all to 
be turned out before He can work. For there is 
sin in the whole of it. We can all find ourselves 
guilty there. What right have we to think and 
act as if life here were every thing ? It is thank- 
lessness, it is rebellion, it is waste and destruction, 
to do that. Many a man is troubled at that sweep- 
ing condemnation of all men which the Bible con- 
tains, and which is the first, most prominent fact 
of the Gospel's teaching. He reads, "All have 
sinned, and come short of the glory of God ;" and 
then he turns to his life, and it does not seem to 
be so bad. Fact by fact he looks at it, and it only 
seems as if he had done what life demanded at each 
step. He has compromised a little here, and been 
a little too persistent for his own desires there ; 
but, on the whole, it does not look like a very 
bad life. And so he hands the condemnation over 
to his neighbor, and thinks that it must have been 
meant for him. But all the time he has overlooked 



Hopefulness Through Christ 12$ 

the limit of his life's purpose, which has affected 
every single action, and stamped it as guilty. He 
has come terribly short of the glory of God, — so 
far short of it that it has slipped entirely out of 
sight. What right had he to live for this world, 
when he was made for something infinitely greater ? 
or to believe in success here only, when praise in 
God's sight was offered him .'' Disbelief in that 
future prospect, and hopelessness of any thing be- 
yond what he saw, is the sin which has made each 
action wrong, and has made all life come short of 
the glory of God, which he should have been mak- 
ing his own. 

You cannot tell where the crooked line begins 
to deviate from the straight. The more you divide 
it and subdivide it, the more difficult it is to find 
its point of divergence. But when the one is seen 
to have a direct object to which it points in all its 
parts, and the other is seen to have no such end, 
then the difference between right and wrong ap- 
pears. By such a judgment it finds its way to 
every conscience. Those men and women whom 
Jesus turned out of that room, that He might work 
unhindered, they who laughed Him to scorn, were 
not wicked or light-minded persons : they were 
there in the interest of all that was respectable and 
proper. But they were so infected by the hope- 
lessness of all beyond this life, that only as they 



126 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

went could He work His great work of life. That 
is the demand for renunciation. In sight of the 
truth that no soul is made to die, but must live 
forever, all lower views of life must be put aside, 
all action which embodies them must be made to 
cease a while, that this great one may reveal the 
power which lies latent in every human soul, — the 
power to live forever by the word of God. 

Some of the special features of this story throw 
still greater light upon this fundamental distinc- 
tion between Christ and the world. 

Notice first the solitude of Jesus in the midst 
of those men and women. He was the only man 
who had that great faith so that He could declare 
it. And how hard it is to be hopeful alone ! A 
gloomy atmosphere depresses a man ; the sur- 
roundings of mourning break the most courageous 
spirits. Hopefulness wants to feel itself echoed 
from other hearts. And the greater the subject on 
which the man is to be hopeful, the more support 
he needs. Some little expectation for to-morrow 
a man may keep in his heart, even though no other 
one has the same feeling ; but to be hopeful over 
an issue which stretches far into the future, which 
involves powers that we cannot regulate, and which 
are mysterious to all men in their working, — that 
is something which no man dares to attempt. Ask 
the reason of the way in which a young man 



Hopefulness Through Christ. 127 

bright in his expectations, and ardent in his feel- 
ings, settles down to some smaller view of success 
than he once allowed himself to entertain, and you 
will find that it was because, thrown into the asso- 
ciation of older men than himself, he found his 
dreams laughed at, his youthful ideals treated with 
scorn, as things which they, too, had once known, 
but had long ago outgrown. He does not at once 
grant that he is mistaken, and that his visions are 
mere illusions ; but day by day they become less 
distinct, until at last they are found to have de- 
parted, because there was no place found for them. 
We do not see the greatness of Jesus until we see 
His loneliness ; we do not get His true relation to 
us, until we see how He led the way, where we are 
asked to follow. One man alone said, " She is not 
dead, but sleepeth." There was no peradventure 
about it, there was not even the softness of expres- 
sion in saying that she would live. He said that 
she lived. Nothing but the extremest personal 
power could use that tone of certainty, of the 
greatest, most mysterious issue. Because in Him- 
self He felt the power of life which He was to give 
to her, because He felt the identity of His being, 
with that stream of life which was in Him, and was 
to be poured forth into that girl, because He knew 
what He was, therefore that life was not gone, and 
she was to be blessed, was as truly asleep as is the 



128 Hopefulness Through Christ, 

child who only waits for morning light to start into 
new activity itj^ busy, restless feet and hands. It 
was what Christ was which made Him able to stand 
alone ; it was what He was that made Him the 
leader of the human race. In the world disciples 
were faithless, in the garden disciples slept, on 
the cross his friends deserted Him. Let us not 
be too indignant as we read of those facts. It was 
the condition of His success that it should be so. 
It was by that that He showed Himself the Saviour 
of men, the incarnate Son of God. Had He stood 
with the support of others, it would have been a 
very different story. He must go before them ; 
and more often their desertion meant His greatness 
above them and all of us, than it did their small- 
ness below us. When men would have reached 
out for the support of the others, and, feeling no 
hand, would have drawn back, it was His to say, 
** And yet I am not alone, because the Father is 
with me." It was that which put Him in advance 
of every position which any son of man had ever 
taken. Separating Him from all others, it placed 
Him where all others could come up to Him. 

We are told to be hopeful ; to live, not as dying 
men, but as the sons of God, whose privilege it is 
to have life eternal : and we answer. How can we } 
We stand alone ; every event of life, every desire 
of our souls, seems to laugh at such a claim ; it asks 



Hopefulness Through Christ. 129 

for sympathy, and it gets none. Then we see the 
meaning of His life. We are not alone ; He was, 
but we are not. There are sympathy and support 
in Him, who led the way into that purity and con- 
secration which is the portion of the sons of God. 
What He did not have, we have at every step ; and 
His words say, *' Lo, I am with you alway, even un- 
to the end of the world." In these days Christ's 
oneness with us is a very precious truth to the 
Christian world. Perhaps it never was more fully 
dwelt upon than it is to-day. But how, just as soon 
as we grasp it, we feel that it demands only more 
fully that sense of Christ's greatness above us ! 
just as the soldier, grasping his sword, wants its 
hilt fitted to his hand, wants it to be soft to his 
sensitive flesh ; but he wants to know that it 
carries a blade of shining, sharp, and hardened 
steel, to give that hand a power which it can never 
have of itself. 

And then notice, in the next place, that though 
Christ felt His power, and asserted it only more 
boldly in the presence of those hopeless men and 
women, that power could not or did not work 
until they had all been put forth from the room. 
It shows us the distinction between two things 
that we often confuse. Unfavorable circumstances 
may hinder, but they cannot kill, true power. We 
despair of God's existence because we do not 



130 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

see Him accomplishing all His purposes at once. 
We doubt our own possession of power from God 
because we are not able to do some work w^hich 
seems to be demanded of us. We cannot do in 
one moment what Jesus did, — turn out all adverse 
influences, — and so we let them tell us that they 
are all-powerful. The actions of Christ among 
those men were tokens of all His action every- 
where. When He prepared the way for that mir- 
acle, quickly as it may have been done, it told the 
story that His power is never more truly present 
than when it is preparing the way for its own per- 
fect working. The one moment when He stood 
there, viewing the mourners, and listening to their 
wailings, was enough to discourage one who had 
no clear view of the importance and glory of that 
work of preparation. It is not so impressive as 
the work of victory, but it is the one that belongs 
to us largely here. Why does not the power of 
God within us do more "^ If it is Divine, why 
does it not show more marks of its heavenly ori- 
gin .-* This mere defensive work seems very 
small, but it is very necessary ; to believe in it 
enough to do it well is to be courageous in all 
life's work. For at one time we have just to say 
to our souls, "Believe in Christ," in the presence 
of some question or doubt that we cannot solve ; at 
another it is to say to our souls, " Do God's will," 



Hopefulness Through Christ. 131 

though some other path appears more pleasant 
and jDrofitable. We ask, if it is the path of God, 
why doesn't it appear pleasant and profitable ? 
Because other things hold the ground. They 
have to be turned out first by persistent refusal to 
yield ; and to do that is to win more than half 
the battle. Perhaps that is all we are to do here, 
just to resist ; perhaps we shall go down to our 
graves without seeing the spiritual miracles ac- 
complished which we have wished for all our 
lives. Many a worker in a great cause has done 
that, has been unable to do his great work be- 
cause the atmosphere was not right, the time had 
not arrived. But his patient persistence in that 
struggle made him the great man, and gave to the 
world the victory for which he longed. Incom- 
plete moral aspirations, unsatisfied spiritual yearn- 
ings, seem to make up the possession with which 
many a man leaves this world ; but to have kept 
his faith through all those discouragements, to 
have believed that God was working and would 
conquer, that was the assurance of victory and 
joy. Looked at thus, Jesus' life-work never got 
beyond that stage of saying of the world, '' It is 
not dead, but sleepeth." His last word from the 
world was one of scorn, expressing itself in that 
act of crucifixion ; He did not live to see the dead 
body of mankind restored to life. Still, that mira- 



132 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

cle is working itself out ; and only when the last 
faithlessness of the world shall be turned out, will 
it be accomplished. But He triumphed as much 
in that faith in His Father which made Him able 
to be crucified, as He will in that future reign at 
that Father's right hand. The one was the pledge 
of the other. And forever His blessing is upon 
all-enduring faith. 

It is not what we accomplish, but what we 
persist in for our God, which saves us. " By faith 
ye are saved." Grant all the distortions that 
men have made of that grand word, as they will 
of every good thing in the world : still, when we 
see its right meaning, we hold to it as one of 
Christianity's greatest gifts ; for it says, However 
unfavorable your circumstances, hindering great 
accomplishments, however hard the battle full of 
stubborn enemies and hard reverses, however 
small the gleanings of our poor sterile fields, the 
faith that fought on the one and worked on the 
other shall work salvation, and restore to the life 
of God its Father the soul that was dead in sin. 
That is a gospel to carry to the discouraged mil- 
lions of the earth, and by it to nerve them to 
new effort. 

St. Mark tells us, that, after turning out all the 
other mourners and the minstrels, Jesus took the 
parents of the child, and entered into the room. 



Hopefulness Through Christ 133 

and brought the child to life. Those parents by 
their presence seemed to form the connection 
between the faithful Christ and the unbelieving 
world, for they had a relation to both. Doubt- 
less to them the words of Jesus, ''She is not 
dead, but sleepeth," must have seemed very 
strange ; they could not have meant all to them 
that they did to Him. And yet their parental 
love must have fastened on them with a hope 
which did not allow them to join in the scornful 
laughter with which others greeted them. They 
found a response in the deepest feelings of their 
hearts, which no others there appreciated ; and 
so their presence was no hinderance to that mira- 
cle-working power of Christ. And, doubtless, in 
those wailings a hope kept alive by a parent's love 
had yearned for something more, and was ready 
for it when it came. The supernatural in them 
was ready to be led by the supernatural in Him ; 
for, hopeless and limited as the horizon of human 
action is, there are feelings of the human heart 
which are ever whispering words of something 
more beyond. The feelings of mutual attach- 
ment, the bond of family affection, the simple 
wish for a great one on whom to lean, whose 
power is far above all that exists here, — those are 
the things which are ever finding expression in 
men. Value such bands of life, bind them very 



134 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

closely, increase them by the life of richest sym- 
pathy, for they are priceless. They have no 
place in human philosophy ; there is no explana- 
tion of them ; they are flowers which have sprung 
from seeds which have come no one knows 
whence, and they must be crushed out, says mere 
worldly wisdom, as intruders. They are consid- 
ered as weeds, because philosophers can find no 
use for them. Their beauty shall not protect 
them : they must go. The fact that they have 
always had a place of true dignity and power in 
Christ's teaching is a witness to the truth at once 
of them and of it. 

The divine faith of God saying, '' He is not 
dead, but sleepeth," over a sin-stricken world, 
finds its counterpart in the faith of a parent in 
his erring son, whom all the world, and even the 
brother in the home, doubts and despises. The 
name of Father in heaven is the one revealed by 
Christ ; and the earthly relation, so often clouded 
here, finds its warrant and its fulfilment in that 
fact. When, in order that Christ may do His 
work, we turn out the sin of life and the faithless- 
ness of the world from its dominion within us, we 
do not separate ourselves from our human nature. 
We get at parts of it which nothing else can 
ever explain or ever assist. We find in ourselves 
a hope and a power which the whole course of 



Hopefulness Through Christ. 135 

life has been trying to conceal. It is Christ and 
His religion that has been the corner-stone of 
the family ; it is He that has taught self-sacrificing 
labor for our fellow-men ; it is He that has en- 
couraged the growth of charity the world over ; 
it is His name that has become the synonyme for 
all that is sweet and lovely. Because He inspired 
an everlasting hope, therefore at His word sprung 
into new being every institution of life and every 
feeling of the human heart which looks to the 
result of patient, loving working for its vindica- 
tion. 

Fortunes are made in a day, and in a day they 
perish ; material results must be readily acquired, 
for the time is short in which they are to be en- 
joyed. Charity suffereth long, because it liveth 
long. The love of parents and children, brother 
and sister, friend and friend, groweth day by day, 
never is hurried, must not be forced, for it has 
time enough : it is to last forever. The warrant 
of that faith, which none of us can spare from life, 
is in those words of Christ to every soul, " You are 
to live forever." When you hear that truth from 
His lips, and live by it, then you give the word of 
encouragement to all that is best and most lasting 
in life. It is by no chance that moments when 
our deepest feelings and attachments are stirred 
by either sorrow or joy are often full of the richest 



136 Hopefulness Through Christ 

religious experiences and expressions. It is the 
flower turning toward the sun. We have no right 
to mistrust such leadings, and to make disparaging 
remarks about them. It is the parents entering 
with Christ into the room where His Divine love 
performs its wonderful acts. 

There is one more feature of this miracle which 
ought to be remarked upon, because it helps to 
illustrate still farther Jesus' relation to others in 
the performance of it. After the girl was restored 
to health, Jesus ordered to give her meat. It is 
often said that this is a proof of Christ's modera- 
tion and reason in the use of His miraculous 
powers. Where an object could be accomplished 
by other methods, He worked no miracle. He 
who raised from the dead, gave no miraculous sup- 
ply of food. The lesson goes still farther, as it 
shows how the miraculous power goes on, after its 
first exhibition, to affect all other methods of 
work. They who before mourned her as dead, 
were now to give her food as living. Jesus had 
conquered those who laughed Him to scorn ; and 
now those who, by their faithlessness, seemed to 
shut the poor girl away from life, were, because 
His power had intervened, to do all in their power 
to help her life. She was to walk through the 
world, meeting friends who once had mourned 
her, demanding and obtaining the tribute of their 



Hopefulness Through Christ 137 

friendship in a better and richer way. So Jesus 
changes the world from a hopeless to a hopeful 
place. These things about us do injure, and de- 
grade, and treat us as if we were dead very often. 
They seem to be masters ; and we cry out, ** How 
can we resist?" We fight with each in detail, and 
so are conquered. But when by one assertion of 
power we put ourselves in Christ's hands, and by 
His power walk out among them as living souls, 
they give us the bread of our daily life for God. 
This is God's world in which we are living; and if 
we only tell it so by being God's children, and 
claim it for our Father, it is willing enough to help 
us. We turn it out as master, that we may take 
it back as servant ; we turn out the world, not be- 
cause we do not want it, but that we may gain its 
true assistance. And, after all, it is a very kind, 
good-natured world, ready to serve us ; and when 
we grumble at it, it is generally ourselves with 
whom we are finding fault. *'Can I live under 
such a temptation.?" says some man or woman 
surrounded by circumstances adverse to a holy 
life. Not until you have heard God's words, " I 
say unto thee, arise." When you have done that, 
then look at your tempted life, and you will find 
that it gains new strength every day, just as the 
ship, sound and firm, springs forward to its de- 
sired port under the breeze that will strain at 



138 Hopefulness Through Christ. 

every seam the poor shattered hull, until it has 
sent it to the bottom of the sea. 

So Christ and His work are related to the 
world and its work. We are too easily discour- 
aged. There is a supernatural power in this Sav- 
iour of ours. We ought to believe in Him more 
thoroughly ; to summon Him to help every best 
thing within us, which, heaven-born, is only too 
strange in this world of ours ; to bring under our 
control every earth-born thing, which, made to 
serve, is lording it over us. This is the hope and 
power of the Gospel against the despair and weak- 
ness of mere human life. On which side are we 1 
On the side of that scornful, faithless company, or 
on the side of the faithful, powerful Master } Life 
hangs on the answer to that question. 



X. 



JESUS' LIMITATIONS, HIS POWER, AND 

GLORY. 

''^ For if He were on earth, He skojild 7iot be a priest, seeing that 
there are priests that offer gifts according to the law." — HEBREWS 
viii. 4. 

THE elevation of Jesus to His proper place 
among men is the object of all Christianity, 
and is the method by which it would overcome 
the sin of the world, and bring men back to God. 
In producing such an estimate of Jesus, all the 
facts of His character and position are equally im- 
portant, — those relating to His humiliation as well 
as to His glory ; those which show His limitations 
as well as His greatness. The omission of one of 
them on either side would detract from the perfect 
understanding of Christ, and so far injure the full 
representation of Him. In this text, the fact which 
the writer of the Epistle cites bears witness to the 
truth that there will be earthly aspects of limita- 
tion to the character of Christ, and tells us how 
they are to be looked at, so as to lead to His ultimate 
elevation. Writing for those who were acquainted 

139 



140 Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 

with the ritual of the Jewish temple, he points out 
the fact that the One on whom all the hope of 
Christians was fixed as the fulfiller of that ritual 
was Himself unable, under its regulations, to offer 
a single sacrifice. He never could fill that place, 
which was at the head of the nation, of greatest 
influence and of largest authority. He came of a 
tribe which had no sacerdotal position ; and there- 
fore, as the priest offering in the temple, none of 
His most ardent followers would ever have been 
able to see Him, no matter how long He had lived, 
or how much influence He had gained. 

This fact, which was so striking to a Jew, and 
which must have been a stumbling-block to many 
.a devoted soul, has been reproduced over and over 
again, — we may say is a constant fact. Jesus is 
always falling short of men's ideal. There arose 
the ideal of the ascetic : that was the holiest, the 
best, the noblest life, to men's minds ; and that 
man whose life was open to all the influences 
of His fellow-men, that man who was reproached 
by the malicious distortions of enemies as a glut- 
tonous man and a winebibber, could no more fit 
that character than He could that of the sacrificing 
priest of the ancient temple. The time of chiv- 
alry and of crusades exalted the warrior ; and He 
who sent forth His disciples without sword, and 
healed the ear of Malchus, was no figure to vie 



Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 141 

with the bold knights in their valorous reputations, 
any more than the plain garments of the humble 
Galilean could shine beside the imposing vest- 
ments of Jewish priests. Or, come down to mod- 
ern days, and take the standards of any class in 
life to-day. The scientific thinker asks for facts, 
for analysis, for knowledge of the structure of 
earth and heaven : and those beautiful parables 
and wonderful miracles enter into no such detail ; 
and Jesus in a scientific assembly to-day would be 
as completely out of place as He would have been 
beside the high priest in the Holy of Holies. And 
the business, the commercial, ideal of life, does 
not look for its leader to Him who said, *' Lend, 
hoping for nothing again," and "Take no thought 
for the morrow," any more than priest and Levite 
consulted Christ as to the best mode of offering 
sacrifices. Politics and society would find it 
equally impossible to discover their ideal in Him 
who originated no new system of government, and 
associated always with the lowly. The words of 
Isaiah's prophecy have a real meaning: ''And 
when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that 
we should desire Him." All this causes difficulty. 
Men are listening for the word that shall help 
them in their lives ; and, when they do not hear it 
in their religion, they will look for it elsewhere : 
and so men will be more attached to their newsp?.- 



142 Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 

pers than to their Bibles. How quickly churches 
could be filled if some great authority as to the 
making of money was expounded, Sunday after 
Sunday ! Men, too, who have had their eyes fas- 
tened on a certain ideal, find it hard to respond to 
the greatness of one who is deficient in that par- 
ticular direction, just as men who had looked with 
respect on priest and king found it hard to ac- 
knowledge the greatness of Him, who came with- 
out the crown of either the temple or the palace. 

We need not inveigh against the earnestness of 
pursuits which have erected such ideals, any more 
than this writer found it necessary to heap re- 
proaches on the Jewish system of priesthood be- 
cause it found no place for Christ within it. 
Would Jesus lead the life of the modern clergy- 
man to-day? is the taunt which, from the outside, 
may be thrown at the preaching of His Gospel. 
Better than to answer it by asking whether He 
would find it possible to lead the life of the mod- 
ern merchant or statesman or scholar, better is it 
for all of us to recognize that He would lead the 
life of no one of us. It is easy to make such con- 
trasts, but there is one great truth behind them : 
no forms or modes of action, which we find it 
necessary to observe, could hold the power of that 
Divine life, any more than the life of an ordinary 
Jewish priest, God-ordained as he was, could be 



Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 143 

the measure of the life of a Saviour of the 
world. 

And as we say that, we reach the ground of the 
solution which is given to this difficulty. Jesus 
was not a priest of the old covenant, because He 
was the Mediator of a new and better covenant ; 
He was not a priest in descent from Aaron, be- 
cause He was a Priest forever after the order of 
Melchisedec. The limitations of Jesus are His 
glory ; the fact that He does not claim any of 
these ideals of earthly greatness is because He 
sets up a greater idea], to which they all belong. 
We can find an illustration in our human life. A 
king steps down among his people ; he mingles 
with them, and sees them at their work. And 
there is not one of those workmen that cannot do 
something better than he can. If they should 
bring their difficulties of work to him, he could 
not answer one of them ; he fulfils the ideal of no 
one of their positions. And yet all those interests 
are his, and are strong and healthy through his 
power and character. His kingly character re- 
mains untouched by the superiority of any one of 
those who are eminent in their departments, and 
the carelessness or scorn of some man who thinks 
a man no king who does not know his secrets, 
never moves his mien of royal dignity. The lift- 
ing-up of every one of those subjects to the higher 



144 Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 

conception of the nation over which he rules, is 
a work truly his, as no mechanical knowledge or 
minute practice can ever be. Such was Christ's 
position as king ; and so He stands far above, 
though never apart from, every standard of human 
attainment. He helps every one of them, as He 
brings them all into connection with the very cen- 
tre of life. Pie set forth forever the truth, that 
the life of the lower is to be found in the higher. 
That was what the world needed, and what no 
other one could teach. Many a man is nobler 
and better in his business for the influence of 
the wife who never enters his place of business, 
and knows none of its secrets. True influence 
knows none of our limits, because it is dependent 
on something infinitely greater, and that Christ 
revealed. Our deepest knowledge of the Jewish 
priesthood to-day, our attraction to all that ritual, 
is on account of Him who never could minister at 
its altars. What achievement of self-sacrifice or 
of warlike valor has not gained inspiration from 
Him whose whole life told of the power of stand- 
ing up for principle against all enemies, and exalt- 
ing inward conviction against outward forces } 
And to-day knowledge is strong and pure for His 
influence who made men respect the world in 
which they lived, and taught the duty of honest 
inquiry and manly thought ; business feels the im- 



Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 145 

pulse of the honesty and prudence and strength 
of His teaching, who revealed the true relation 
between man and man, which controls all our 
intercourse ; and whatever virtue dignifies the 
statesman, and whatever grace clothes the man or 
woman of society, finds its truest inspiration and 
illustration in Him. 

Jesus showed that great central truth of the 
sonship of God, of which all our activities are illus- 
trations. He carried none of them to their proper 
end : He left that for His members. And as 
they do that with all their individual eagerness 
and industry, they are but carrying out His work. 
His teaching by illustrations was no accident. It 
was the setting-forth of that truth, that all the 
developments of life are the opening of the truth 
of Him who is the life of the world. There is 
no other possibility of Christ as the revelation of 
God but this one. The omnipotence of God 
reaching to every minutest corner of the earth, 
able to take up in that mighty hand, and carry 
with perfect ease, the burdens at which we men 
toil so long, — that would have frightened us, and 
seemed to dismiss us as useless in the world ; but 
this revelation of God, telling the greatness of 
what we did, but never marring its dignity in our 
minds, — this one draws us forth to sweetest labor 
under Him who gives it to us. 



146 Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 

There is one direction in which the superiority 
of Jesus has always been acknowledged, and that 
is in moral life. There no teacher, no master, has 
ever surpassed Him ; and all men have said that 
He understood the laws of practical life, and could 
apply them with a certainty and decision wlijch 
belonged to no other. Others, in philosophical 
speculations on morals, have attempted more than 
His words ever contained ; others have surpassed 
Him in tracing the historical development of mor- 
als : but in practical application of morality, none 
have ever been so successful. We follow with 
dreary resignation the definition of duties in East- 
ern codes of laws and Western disquisitions on 
life, and then turn to the Lord Jesus, and find 
some short word of His outweighing them all. 

But this granting of the region of moral life to 
Jesus carries out very fully all that we have seen 
about His relation to all life. For that depart- 
ment is precisely the one which suffers under the 
influence of zeal and mastery in the ordinary busi- 
ness of life. That which is the interest of all, be- 
longs to no one. The business-man says, "I can- 
not be too particular about morals, and succeed in 
life ; " the politician calls high-flown and imprac- 
ticable the zeal which protests against all corrup- 
tion and bribery ; literature and art say that 
considerations of morals must be put aside, and 



Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 147 

art must be pursued for art's sake ; society allows 
customs and forms which its members cannot ap- 
prove, but which they say are necessary. All of 
us find ourselves compromising conduct for the 
sake of success. Can we not say of Christ that 
the very thing which would prevent His being a 
priest in many of our modern temples, which 
would keep Him from being the successful man 
among us, would be that pure life, that consecra- 
tion to a higher standard of living, which distin- 
guishes Him from all others "^ 

The fact, then, that this life, which devoted itself 
to no one pursuit, but called all pursuits up into 
the higher one of being sons of God, that this life 
exalted that theoretically important, but practi- 
cally slighted department of moral life, is wonder- 
fully suggestive. It tells us that he who follows 
that life will find himself in the same moral atmos- 
phere. Low and compromised moral life comes 
from narrow views ; from fixing our minds on some 
immediate object, and making that the measure of 
all our existence. He who sees such an object only 
as a part of something greater is the man who will 
cease sacrificing nobleness of character and purity 
of life, which are treasures that will last to eternity, 
for ends that must be limited and transient. Is 
not that precisely the kind of assistance which we 
need .'* We men must be priests in our own tem- 



.148 Jesus' Lhnitaiions, His Power, and Glory. 

pies, and we are made to aspire to the highest 
places in the regions of life where God has placed 
us. That earnestness, as it limits our sight, may 
be destroying our character and hope of eternal 
life. We plead as our excuse that we are doing 
our best, and cannot be expected to see the full 
Divine meaning of all our work. But when that is 
showed to us, when, through such a life as that of 
Jesus, we see that our little pursuit is not the end 
of our being, then with that revelation goodness 
stands forth as a real power in life, and we hold to 
it in spite of every sacrifice for which it may call, 
in the name and spirit of Him who has thus conse- 
crated it for us. Our pursuit shall still be vigor- 
ous and successful ; but, by connection with Him, 
character, too, shall be purified and elevated by it. 
That is one advantage of Christ's position out- 
side of our special pursuits. We find another in 
the way in which it draws us all together. He is 
for all, because no special pursuit causes Him to 
belong specially to any. Jesus as the perfect Jew- 
ish priest would have had but slight chance of in- 
fluence on our times, when priest and temple have 
disappeared ; and equally so, Jesus the specially 
successful man in any direction would have ever 
seemed to be a special power and help for one class 
of men, however broad His culture, or large His 
sympathy. The secret of His life would have 



Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 149 

admitted of easier attainment to those who ap- 
proached it from the side of that special knowl- 
edge and preparation. But now He is for all ; 
none can specially claim him, and all are drawn 
together in Him. One complains that it is use- 
less to ask him on one day in seven to dismiss 
his pursuits of the other six from his mind, and 
to join in the worship and thought of Christian 
service. It seems too far away from him, and 
his thoughts fly back to their old haunts of the 
week past. Is not the fact that they do so, greater 
proof of the need of the influence of Jesus, that this 
narrowing process may cease } Is not the way that 
Christian worship calls us all thus together, men, 
women, and children, without distinction, a part of 
Christ's greatest blessing in telling iis of our man- 
hood which is beneath all our pursuits and greater 
than them all } We all come from our different 
pursuits ; but it is the same tale of mingled joy and 
sorrow, success and discouragement, struggle and 
triumph, sin and holiness, which we bring. It is 
the same word of love, forgiveness, hope, and 
strength that we want to hear. The bands of 
life are strengthened in the presence of Him who 
belongs to us all. We feel the influence in deep- 
ened friendship, widened sympathy, enriched fam- 
ily feeling. It will be harder for our variety of 
pursuits to separate us when in truth we recog- 



150 Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 

nize our relation to Him who is the common Lord 
and Saviour of us all. We cannot afford to ask or 
to follow a narrower religion, when we in the limits 
of one day are put under so many varied demands 
from life about us. The very men and women by 
our side call upon us to live by the power of Him 
who, putting aside all human greatness, made 
Himself the Lord and Master of us all. 

The older we become, the harder it is to become 
Christians. We have such well-defined lives ; our 
ideas are crystallized, our prejudices are hardened, 
our pursuits are fixed. Every day we meet men 
of different cast, and turn from them to pursue 
our own lives, perfectly sure that ours are best 
for us. Then this demand of Christ, that we 
should give ourselves to Him, meets us; and we 
give it the same reception, and go on our way sat- 
isfied with ourselves. But, in the light of our 
truth to-day, the call of Christ cannot be treated 
so. It is not like any other. We are refusing, 
not another life, but life itself ; we are turning, 
not from another pursuit, but from the power of 
all true pursuit. Against other men a man may 
claim his right and be strong : but here " he that 
loseth his life shall find it ; " he that looks beyond 
that which distinguishes him from others shall find 
that which binds him to God. The child, before life 
has exalted one type and mode of action, finds the 



Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 1 5 1 

belief in the great God, and the faith in the loving 
Jesus, the most natural thing to his mind. They 
embrace all things, and are well adapted to that 
universal interest and confiding sympathy which 
is childhood's happy possession. It is a blessed 
gift to us that in this kingdom of heaven, where 
Christ reigns, we can still — nay, we must still — 
be children. We are asked to put ourselves aside, 
to cast away that which comes from our sinful 
desires and narrower pursuits, and to enter into 
relation with Him who is large enough to embrace 
all men, because He is the Son of God. Ought 
not manhood, so eager, so self-assertive, so power- 
ful in its contact with its fellow-men, to thank 
God for that which thus helps it, while laboring 
hard in its own chosen line, to retain the breadth 
of life and thought which can come from God 
alone, which makes life's pursuits not a lowering 
and destroying, but an elevating and saving pro- 
cess } 

For these earthly pursuits and professions of 
ours change and pass away. We pass that time 
of manhood, and a second childhood comes. The 
definiteness of pursuit again fades, and the tem- 
ples at whose altars we have ministered know us 
no longer. And then the true power of Him by 
whom we have lived those lives will carry us for- 
ward to new work, and never let us feel that life 



152 Jesus' Limitations, His Power, and Glory. 

is exhausted or wasted. As the priesthood of the 
Jewish temple passed by the power of Christ into 
that better and higher priesthood of the Christian 
believer, so life's training, narrow and technical as 
it may have seemed at times to be, by the power 
of Christ shall prepare us for the larger and better 
work in which we are to serve Him forever. 



XI. 

OUR DAILY BREAD. 

" Give lis day by day our daily breads — LUKE xi. 3. 

IF we take the Lord's Prayer as it was given us 
by Christ, every one of its petitions must be 
looked at in its connection, in order that it may 
give us its full meaning. Here this petition for 
something which every man appreciates and every 
man desires, bread, is placed after the petitions 
for the glory of God's name, the progress of His 
kingdom, and the performance of His will, which 
are not commonly objects of deep interest among 
men. When we have offered those, then we can 
really pray, **Give us this day our daily bread." 
For we want confidence that God desires that we 
should have bread ; we want to know that He is 
interested in the matter. We appreciate its im- 
portance, but does He .<* Until we have some 
assurance that He does, we cannot pray the 
prayer except as a mere form ; and therefore 
we are told to offer those other petitions first, 
that we may have some idea of our right relation 

153 



154 Our Daily Bread. 

to God. When we know that we are as much 
interested in the glory of God's name as He is 
Himself, when we appreciate our position as a 
part of His kingdom, when His will is felt as con- 
taining all that is good and desirable in every 
one of the creatures that His willing hand has 
matle, then no want is distant from His heart. 
It may be way out on the circumference of His 
action : but He, sitting at the centre, feels it in all 
its intensity ; and we, however distant we may be, 
know where to look for interest, sympathy, and 
comfort. 

Here, in its restoring to man of this sense of 
his connection with God, is the glory of religion. 
This is the work that it does for our common 
life ; to give this sense of reality of connection 
with God, is to make the man as confident as the 
birds. **Are ye not much better than they.-*" 
Why, then, are you fretful and anxious, and they 
calm and confident } Because they have never lost 
their sense of connection with God, as far as 
it was given them : you have. Sin, worldliness, 
the reality of things around you, the vagueness 
of your Father's love, are not allowing you to 
know the power and love of God as yours, as 
they were meant to be. They are lost, and 
dropped out of sight. Let them once be restored, 
and the care for daily bread does not vanish ; it 



Our Daily Bread. 155; 

becomes deeper than ever : you see it now as a 
thing resting on God's heart and mind as much 
as on your own. The care for daily bread, the 
constant strain of earthly anxieties, are not God's 
ground of finding fault with you. He gave you 
every one of the cares ; they are absolutely neces- 
sary, and they are holy because His mark is upon 
them. But the power to see them in no higher 
light is what constitutes guilt. The heavy black 
weights of a clock are necessary to make the. 
hands on the dial move, and speak to all that see 
them of the order of God's universe, of the value 
of time, of the steady progress of life. When 
a man values the lessons of that dial, when he 
is one who wants to be systematic, profitable, and 
earnest, then he never neglects those weights :: 
he winds them up as they have run down ; he 
keeps them in order ; he values them as he thinks 
of them working by night and day for his eternal 
interests. There you have the picture of God's 
care for the bodily wants of a man because he is 
His child, and the conscientious and religious 
man's care for his bodily interests, dark, dull, 
dreary weights as they may seem to be sometimes, 
because of the soul which they help in its course 
and service for God. Turn round the picture, 
imagine a man in his foolishness painting and 
adorning those weights, constantly looking at 



556 Our Daily Bread. 



^them, valuing the face of the clock because its 
>moving hands show that the weights are moving, 
rand are doing their work, and are in good condi- 
tion, and you have the man who values religion 
and all the higher motives of life only as far 
as they make him more comfortable and more 
easy. Yes, there is a connection between reli- 
gion and life; but in order to see what God 
means it to be, we must understand it as a 
-connection wherein religion has the mastery, and 
gives the rest of life importance. Otherwise, 
the religion will soon lose its vitality, just as 
^the man will not value the face of the clock 
'long when it simply speaks of the weights ; he 
•will take the motion of the weights alone, and 
^be satisfied with that. The man will take his 
%read without praying for it, eat it without look- 
ring up to God, and will let this petition die from 
ihis lips. And so, as we utter it, it is a prayer 
ithat God will give us a true idea of the rela- 
'tion of all the interests of our life to Him; will 
let us feel that there is good and deep reason 
which can never be shaken, since it is founded 
in His nature and ours, why He and we should 
care for every slightest interest and want which 
any of His creatures may feel. 

The prayer is for bread alone, and therefore 
most of us would be disappointed if it were 



Our Daily Bread. 157 

answered literally, and would think that life could 
not go on with such slight provision. And yet, 
I think we want to retain the word, though the 
word rendered ** bread " had probably con>e to 
have the wider meaning of ''provisions" when 
it was used in the Lord's Prayer. For there is 
surely something very significant in our prayer 
for this one thing, which the world has always 
wanted in all places and at all times, the want 
for which has been supplied in so many ways, 
and has called upon the activity of so large a 
proportion of each generation. We feel that no 
other word could speak to us so strongly, not 
only of our desires, but of those desires as the 
gift of God ; no other word could limit our 
prayer, as it should be limited, to legitimate 
wants ; and no other word could extend our peti- 
tion so widely to every want that is legitimate. 
The same desire within us may clamor at one 
time for satisfaction that we may do good, and 
perform our duty, and at another for purposes 
of crime or selfish gratification ; at one time it 
comes laden with a command and approval from 
God, at another time it is prompted by men's 
influence or our own passions ; at one time it is 
bread, at another it is poison. God alone can 
know and understand and discriminate between 
these desires of ours, and we need to be pro- 



158 Our Daily Bread. 



tected against ourselves ; and therefore we pray, 
** Give us this day our daily bread!' 

Or, take another difficulty in life. How often 
there seems a strange, irreconcilable fight within 
us between the need of simplicity and the de- 
mands of more complex and cultivated lives ! We 
cannot go backward, and yet it seems almost as if 
we were manufacturing desires which crowd God's 
original nature out of sight. But that nature 
is His in its development, as much as it is in its 
first promptings ; both in the race and in the indi- 
vidual it is His in its manhood as well as its child- 
hood. Only feel that His will is the true one ; 
let life be under His guidance ; struggle against 
the mere desires of selfishness and ease ; value 
every new acquirement that makes you more 
efficient for God ; dread every thing that makes 
you cowardly, every refinement that interferes 
with the honest simplicity of your soul in God's 
work, and makes you afraid of man and man's 
standards. All legitimate wants that belong to 
the development of our God-given nature are 
included in that word " bread." Pray, " Give us 
this day our daily bread. Feed the want that 
came from Thee ; starve the rest of my demands." 
And, praying that prayer, in the same spirit you 
will regulate your life rightly, and be wise in your 
selection of the cultivating, refining, and educat- 



Our Daily Bread. 159 

ing forces which are to bring out of your nature 
the possibilities and desires that God Himself has 
implanted there. We know the difference be- 
tween true and false cultivation. The artificial 
manners, the touchy jealousy about one's rights, 
the nervous anxiety as to men's opinions of the 
latter, all contrast only too strongly with the open 
simplicity, the confident magnanimity, the calm 
self-possession, of the true man and woman. It 
is only the reflection of a difference in God's sight 
between the man who has cultivated himself 
by manufacturing or following lower and earthly 
standards, and him who has gone on, led and fed 
by a heavenly Father, who never fails to develop 
want after want in this rich nature of ours, and 
has always the appropriate supply for each. 

And then, all men want bread, and none can 
live without it. The student and the laboring- 
man, the millionnaire and the beggar, have one 
dish in common ; bread is a fuel for every human 
fire, whether it burn high or low, from the 
watch-fire on the mountain to the hidden fire 
on one poor family hearth. And since under 
that head come all our earthly and bodily desires, 
as wants created by God, they cease to divide us 
from other men. We see their wants, too, higher 
and lower than ours, coming from God ; and that 
fact is far more important than differences. We 



i6o Our Daily Bread. 

cease to envy, cease to be proud. The unity of 
the heart that sends and the hand that supplies is 
felt in all our relations. We feel that God, if He 
will, can bring us up to the wants of others ; 
He can bring others up to us. He made us to 
differ ; He has infinite resources, He has infinite 
time. Wants are made, wants are satisfied, by 
Him. That fact, contained in that one word 
" bread," throws us back on His wisdom, as we all 
of us, children of one common family, meet around 
the table of our Father who art in heaven, and 
pray, " Give us day by day our daily bread." 
Pray it as a prayer against contention and strife, 
and it will be a universal blessing. 

Does God give us our bread } Is it not a thing 
that we ought to work for, and not to pray for, 
unless we really desire to see manna come down 
out of the heavens again. Bread and earthly bless- 
ings generally represent to us human energy, 
wisdom, and prudence ; and it will be a great 
loss to the world when they cease to do so. But 
so much the more reason is there that we should 
pray for bread ; for then our prayer really ap- 
proaches God as He is, — a God working through 
secondary causes in His management of the 
earthly interests of men. Those first petitions of 
the Lord's Prayer are prayers that a man's soul 
can appreciate, and to that soul God can and does 



Our Daily Bread. i6i 

speak directly. But leave those to stand alone, 
and we see God as of necessity one who does 
work at first hand ; and that, He is not, and can- 
not be. It does not add to God's glory to think 
of Him as such a one. That throne of His, to- 
ward which we look up and pray with all our 
hearts, "Thy kingdom come," would not be more 
powerful or more kindly if it were where every 
commonest hand could touch it. That name of 
His, which lies close to our secret thoughts, would 
not be more hallowed if He walked among us, giv- 
ing us our bread with His own hand. It is more 
wonderful to think of Him ^s bringing food to 
generation after generation through so many 
various and appropriate channels. It is kinder to 
think of Him as one who stimulates His children, 
respecting their powers ; showing Himself in a 
thousand different ways, rather than by bringing 
supplies in one evident, open way. Bread-fruit 
growing on the trees does not tend to the develop- 
ment of devotional or religious men. The coun- 
tries in which you find the one, do not show you 
the best specimens of the other. The inhabitants 
of those tropical lands look up just high enough 
to see the tree, and are satisfied. But bread 
brought from the earth by hard labor, eaten in the 
sweat of the brow, makes the man rise and praise 
God with all his developed faculties, and say, 



1 62 Our Daily Bread. 

" Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself," 
and all the more wonderful because of that. 

A man comes and says to you, " Give me 
bread." It is the easiest way to give him the 
price of a loaf : it is harder, it is wiser, it is kinder, 
to find him work, to stimulate his energy, to en- 
courage his flagging spirits, to procure friends for 
him. Sometimes he is passing through an inter- 
mediate wilderness, where he needs a little manna 
rained down for a time ; and you are to imitate 
your God in doing it. But that is not the rule of 
working ; nor is it God's. And yet, when you had 
thus set a man upon his feet, you would not for a 
moment think that you had not answered his cry 
for bread, or did not deserve his thanks. You 
would expect them all the more, and they would 
be more valuable as they came from the lips of an 
independent man, instead of from the parrot-like 
phrases of a pauperized human being. 

So we pray, and the best answer God can give 
is to make us men. We see its answer in every 
friend, in every strong thought, virtuous resolu- 
tion, and energetic impulse. We learn to acknowl- 
edge Him everywhere. We trace Him from our 
table to the sunbeam that on some distant prairies 
ripened the wheat. He is diffused in all places. 
He is a God of wonderful resources. He is our 
God, meeting us at every point, speaking to us of 



Our Daily Bread. 163 

the greatness and happiness of life. The prayer 
makes us respect ourselves, as we see God thus 
ready to mingle His power with ours, and to work 
with us everywhere. Give us our bread, not Thine. 
Let it be ours. It comes from God ; our prayer 
shows that : and therefore, when prayer has estab- 
lished that relation strongly, we need not be afraid 
to give that possessive pronoun all its force. Hu- 
man possessorship is dangerous only when no 
such prayer is offered. Let the gifts come marked 
with your own name, speaking of personal respon- 
sibility, of personal duty, and God will become 
glorified more than ever. Our bread, not mine. 
You do not, you must not, want your neighbor's 
bread ; you must want him to have that. Where 
is there a chance for dishonesty, where for oppres- 
sion, when we pray such a prayer as that } No 
grinding the face of the poor, no withholding their 
wages, no reliance on their helplessness, when we 
have prayed that God would give them their bread. 
It is theirs, God gave it them ; and we are to see 
that our hand never keeps back the blessing for 
which we pray. In the ever-recurring crusade 
against property, in the constantly renewed con- 
flict between classes, upon what basis can we 
meet which will stand more firmly than the sim- 
ple prayer from all classes of men, *' Give us this 
day our daily bread " ? It is a prayer that we may 



164 Our Daily Bread. 

love our work, appreciate our duty, assist the poor, 
and respect our neighbor ; it is a prayer for ear- 
nestness, and a prayer for justice; it is a prayer 
which, asking for bread, asks God to guide and in- 
spire all these activities and relations which the 
ever-present and universal search for bread involves. 
There is another expression in the prayer which 
we must not overlook. In Matthew it reads, 
" Give us this day our daily bread ; " in Luke, 
** Give us day by day our daily bread." In both, 
therefore, is that distributive idea of allotting to 
each day the proper character and quantity of its 
bread. For how the days do differ ! At one 
time it is the diminution of supply that is wanted, 
to abate our pride, to increase our sense of de- 
pendence, to chasten and soften us ; at another 
only a full table and prosperity can give us 
strength and encouragement. We labor on the 
same, day after day, trying to get all we can, the 
best and the most. We know not how to regulate 
our own lives : we are beyond ourselves. Our 
lives are too delicate for our hands to manage, 
and so we leave it to God. We can do nothing 
else, for we cannot see either the poverty or the 
fever of our blood. Unrequited labor is no con- 
tradiction, therefore ; unexpected and apparently 
cruel disappointment is not to seem unaccount- 
able. Neither of them is to make us say, " I will 



Our Daily Bread. 165 

not labor or I will not enjoy and be happy again." 
It is right for us to keep the stream of human life 
full of activity and work. Only He who presides 
over us, "our Father," knows when and where 
that flood shall be brought to bear on the machin- 
ery of life, so that it shall either produce the 
greatest results, or just let us have enough, per- 
haps scarcely enough, to live on. In our earliest, 
simplest prayer we embody this trust, which it is 
the work of all life to learn perfectly. We would 
not leave it out, as we see on every side men 
making shipwreck of themselves because they 
-think that they know and understand all the 
wants of their own life. We can only determine 
to say and use it more constantly, to remember it 
under disappointment, to rejoice in it in prosper- 
ity, to feel sure that the Father alone can feed us 
with food convenient for us. 

Surely we have seen that this prayer covers 
range enough to make those who pray it ask for 
some assurance that it can be fulfilled. Touching 
all our wants, our growth, our relation to others, 
our sense of trust and confidence, it is not a prayer 
that can be offered to any one who may chance to 
be near us. We want one who has power and 
sympathy and knowledge; one who is in heaven, 
out of which come our supplies of life ; one who 
is on earth, where here we earn and eat our bread. 



1 66 Our Daily Bread. 

How do we know our Father to be such a one ? 
The other petitions go up to Him without incon- 
gruity, but for this one we hesitate whether it is 
fit for His ear. Now, with this need, that name, 
" Bread of Life," which Christ claimed for Him- 
self, has a new meaning. It is a very rich figure. 
" The bread of God is He which cometh down 
from heaven, and giveth life unto the world." 
That is the true bread. It is no manna dropping 
every morning : it is better than that. It is 
always present. It is the love of God to stimu- 
late us ; to tell us that God never forgets us ; to 
remind us of our own importance, and of that of 
our brother ; to make us confident that God will 
make all things work together for good to them 
that love Him. 

Christ is thus the incentive to a true life. He 
is on the earth among men, where He came to 
live, and so He is the one who can be indeed the 
** Bread of Life." ' Most of us are not starving ; 
but most of us are troubled, nervous, hurried, in 
this earthly work of life. Is it not salvation in- 
deed to be told thus of the love of God, who has 
sent His Son, that ** whosoever believeth in Him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life " t It 
is the calm, quiet, joyful workers that succeed in 
the world. You cannot separate the external and 
the internal in life, and therefore you cannot sepa- 



Our Daily Bread. 167 

rate Christ and our daily bread. The catechism 
phrase is, '' I desire that God will send us all 
things that are needful both for our souls and 
bodies." God's gift to a world calling for bread 
is not a stone, no dead gift, but the presence of 
His Son. By that He strengthens us ; we take up 
the old work stronger and better, and our prayer 
for daily bread is answered every day. Every 
piece of bread, every blessing of life, speaks of 
our Saviour. Every emergency, all the steady 
work of life, tell of His readiness to save. This 
is a Christian prayer ; it was dictated by Christ. 
It is never uttered rightly without Him. Say it 
at the entrance of each day's work, and then go 
forth to live in the power and name and love of 
that Saviour by whom we are assured of its per- 
petual answer. No life relying on Him shall ever 
fail : it shall be fed by God itself ; it shall be kept 
and guided by a closer and better love than even 
that without which a sparrow doth not fall to the 
ground. 



XII. 
GIFT AND PURCHASE. 

^^ But Peter said unto him. Thy money perish with thee, because 
thoti hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. ''^ 
— Acts viii. 20. 

THE interview between Peter and Simon Magus, 
of the account of which our text is a part, 
gave rise to a word which was much more com- 
monly heard in the Church once than it is now. 
Simony came to mean, in the Church, the buying 
and selling of positions, which involved spiritual 
duties and privileges. Such traffic in the power 
to confer the Holy Ghost is something which, 
ever since the times of the Reformation, the spirit 
of the Church has learned to look upon with the 
greatest horror and dread. The enormities and 
outrages which arose from it are difficult to find 
in any branch of the Church to-day, and the word, 
therefore, has retired into the obscurity of history. 
But is the thing dead } and are we ready yet to 
forget the story and the interview on which that 
word was based "i While human nature remains 
the same, may we not be sure that the danger still 
168 



Gift and Purchase. 169 

remains, and that the warning is still needed ? 
See how general in its terms is Peter's charge. 
It is not that Simon wanted a position in the 
rising Church ; he does not specify the fact that 
he desired to purchase the power of calling down 
the Holy Ghost. Those features are lost sight of 
in the larger charge, that he thought to purchase 
a gift from God. 

We to-day, in the enlargement of life which 
Christianity has produced, look on many things as 
the gift of God. The desires of men do not turn, 
as they did once, to Church positions or minis- 
terial functions. If they did, there would not be 
the constant lament over the deficiency in the 
supply of young men who are offering themselves 
for God's work as ministers in His Church. Other 
paths of life are ever opening as means of bless- 
ing to the world ; other positions are sought as 
conveying influence and power. With this en- 
larged range of desire, the sin of Simon becomes 
also enlarged beyond what it was in the Middle 
Ages, when places in the Church were so valuable. 
Wherever money is looked upon as the means of 
obtaining any of God's gifts, wherever to it is as- 
cribed a power to compel God, directly or indi- 
rectly, there simony will exist. Surely, then, in a 
time when the power of money is dwelt upon as 
it never was before, when, by the possibilities of 



170 Gift and Purchase. 

control and combination which it displays, it some- 
times attracts and again frightens us, when it is 
alternately fascinating and overwhelming, — surely 
such a time is the very one when more than ever 
we need to understand the curse upon its misuse 
which Peter uttered long ago. These are not the 
times which can spare this verse for any dead his- 
torical issue. 

As we read over Peter's words, their very sound 
brings out the nature of the sin, for their terms 
express the contradiction that is involved in all 
misuse of money. To purchase a gift is evidently 
impossible. One of the two words must be 
wrong. Either the thing is not a gift, or else we 
have not purchased it. Is the world, is our life, a 
gift, or is it a purchase .'* Between those two 
ideas we are forever vacillating. Our belief in 
God says that it is a gift : our lives of activity and 
energy say it is a purchase. We talk of provi- 
dence, and then are discouraged at our misfortunes 
or our failures, as if we had never heard of such a 
thing as God's providence. We pray for all bless- 
ings, temporal and spiritual, and then congratu- 
late ourselves when we have put ourselves into a 
position to obtain them. 

Now, into these lives, forever tossed between 
these two ideas, enters the element of money. Its 
one reason of existence is purchase. We cannot 



Gift and Purchase. i/i 

eat it and cannot wear it ; the man who hoards 
it for the mere pleasure of looking at it is ac- 
knowledged to be a pitiable fool. Can we not see 
how at once this universal thing, so necessary 
and so much desired, throws all its weight on the 
side of purchase in our view of life? It makes it 
one continual barter. From hand to hand the 
precious possession passes; it is never out of sight 
long ; it sings its monotonous song of purchase in 
every place. What wonder that it soon seems to 
tell the whole story of life, and to sum up all our 
relations as men. See how the man without 
money begins to look on life entirely from the other 
side, of gift. He rings at your door, and, with his 
face hardened to asking, tells you that you ought 
to help him. He reads you a lecture on your char- 
ity and your modes of giving: it is a subject with 
which he is well acquainted. He lives in order to 
receive gifts ; the world owes him a living, why 
should he purchase it with his work .'* The same 
man, suddenly made rich, often knows not how to 
use his money ; either by lavishness or by squan- 
dering he wastes it, because by long disuse all the 
laws of careful purchase as the basis of human 
action have become obsolete in his mind. 

Purchase is a necessary element of life, and 
money represents it. It is needed for our inde- 
pendence ; without it we sink down into gift- 



172 Gift and Purchase. 

receivers from our fellow-men. The strong, self- 
reliant character that belongs to men of business 
comes entirely from their holding so natural a re- 
lation to their fellow-men ; they receive what 
they pay for, they expect to be paid for what they 
give. That is the simple law of honest trade, 
and it is the law of honest manhood, and woe to 
the man who attempts to avoid it, whether it be 
by begging or by gambling. The very money 
which he receives is a rebuke to him, as it tells 
him of the universal existence of that law of pur- 
chase between man and man, which, like all other 
laws, will punish the man who violates it. Money 
is man's contrivance for his purposes, for conven- 
ience in obeying the law of his human connection. 
The very stamp on it says, "Render unto Caesar 
the things that be Caesar's." 

But when money, with the principle which it 
represents, begins to enter into our relation to 
God, then the contradiction comes, and the sin 
with it. Just as living on men's gifts spoils our 
true relation to them, so trying to purchase of God 
spoils entirely the true sense of our relation to 
Him. God must give : that fact is written in our 
belief of Him as our Creator, our great superior, 
infinitely above us. It is the fact that is repeated 
in the tone of authority that fills every revelation 
of Him ; it is the thought of every heart that 



Gift and Purchase. 173 

cares to look for Him in the earth around us. 
There is no God if we can purchase things of Him. 
Money is utterly atheistic in its very central prin- 
ciple when it is taken out of its proper place ; and, 
as men heap it up, we have only the repetition of 
the old-storied struggle of the giants who heaped 
mountain upon mountain, all of which were so 
good in their places on earth, that they might reach 
to heaven, and unseat God from His throne. As 
money grows in power and influence, this will be 
its destructive power upon men's lives. You need 
not wait for the debased indulgence that comes 
with acquired luxury : the danger is in the first 
dollar that is earned. Beware of it ; it meets all 
men — yes, and women too — as they pass out of 
childhood's state of gift-receiving into manhood's 
time of purchase. There is nothing with which 
to meet it but the simple knowledge of God culti- 
vated by every means which is thrown about us, 
and by every spiritual influence which can be 
brought to bear upon us. The relation to God 
must be learned more and more closely in all its 
special features. The thought and the effort 
must be fixed directly on Him by morals, by reli- 
gion, by worship, by study, by prayer. No new 
view of relations to men can take its place, for 
it is just those which the fact of money is forever 
exaggerating and distorting. 



1/4 Gift and Purchase. 

Which of God's gifts did money ever purchase? 
I need not repeat the commonplaces as to men's 
disappointments in the possession of wealth, for 
surely we know that on that never yet hinged the 
life, the health, the happiness, or the success of a 
man. We have all learned, that, as money removes 
one set of dangers from life, it immediately creates 
others : as it allows greater attention to sanitary 
conditions, it also conduces to luxury and over-in- 
dulgence ; as it makes intercourse between men 
easier, it makes it more selfish and frivolous ; as 
it adds the means of success, it reduces the motive 
for struggle. What is the meaning of this ? Is it 
not that money can purchase human conditions, 
can do its work in its own sphere : it cannot do it 
beyond that sphere; it cannot purchase God's gifts. 
It is the voice of experience echoing that of reli- 
gion, "In the beginning God created the heaven 
and earth;" and "All souls are mine," says God: 
"The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.'* 

And this is a truth which not only those who 
possess money, but all men, must learn. Peter's 
condemnation is of those who thi7zk that the gift 
of God can be purchased with money. He who 
stands at a greater or less distance from wealth, 
envying those who have it, feeling as if they 
had every thing that is good, never recogniz- 
ing the clear limits of the power of purchase in 



Gift and Purchase. 175 

life, but, by longing and struggle, fixing his mind 
on what is constantly hiding all true relation 
to God, he is in as much danger as the man who, 
with money in possession, is acting on its atheis- 
tic character in all his defiance of God and His 
laws. It is the poor in spirit who are blessed, 
and not the poor in purse. It is the man who 
believes in God as his infinite benefactor, from 
whom gifts alone can come, whether or not he has 
in possession that which enables him to purchase 
from his fellow-man, — it is he, and he alone, that 
is blessed. 

Never more than in these times, when money is 
the world's great power, never did all mankind 
more need the simplest, purest, most childlike 
belief in God, that life may be truly complete on 
both sides, toward man and toward God. The 
two sides will not remain without effect upon each 
other. The dependence of the one will soften 
and save from cruelty and haughtiness the inde- 
pendence of the other. He who knows that he is 
constantly receiving from One above him, cannot 
be cruel and exacting toward one below him ; 
nay, he cannot keep from being like his great, 
bountiful God in sweet acts of charity. The inde- 
pendence of the one will add a sense of responsi- 
bility and power to the other ; he who appreciates 
the power that God has given him among his fel- 



1/6 Gift and Purchase. 

low-men, will more gladly enter the service of 
that God to whom he owes so much, thankful for 
the opportunity to do something. The contradic- 
tion between the two sides of life is ours. He 
who rightly knows his God, can hold them both in 
perfect unity. We can know why it is hard for 
those who trust in riches, whether they possess 
them or not, to enter into the kingdom of heaven. 
With man it is impossible : with God all things 
are possible. 

But is there not another higher view which men 
take of money, and which saves it somewhat from 
its atheistic aspect .'' We hear men describe it 
as God's gift, and say that they are in search of it 
that they may do good with it. Many a man has 
started with just such a high intention in his labor 
of life. But what is the matter with such men } 
Why is it that so often, as the money comes, the 
high purpose goes, and at last the man seems satis- 
fied with possessing what he still calls God's gift, 
and what once he so fondly pictured he would use 
for God 1 Is it not another witness to the truth 
of Peter's words of condemnation, that gift and 
purchase cannot be combined 1 The man started 
with the idea of money as God's gift, but there 
his thought of God as a giver stopped. The other 
blessings of God he would purchase with that one : 
he would get comfort and an easy conscience by 



Gift and Purchase. 177 

the circumstances of life that made it unnecessary 
to sin, and easy to be respectable ; he would pur- 
chase religious blessings by gifts to God's treas- 
ury. He acknowledged God as a giver when He 
made this world rich and powerful at creation, 
when He made him with the ability to get wealth, 
when He gave him the circumstances or the op- 
portunities to acquire and to make it ; but God 
as a present giver, one from whose love and free 
grace alone all that is desirable can come, — 
that view of Him was crowded out of sight. And 
so gradually that one gift assumed all power to 
itself; the very way in which it assumed for itself 
the religious sanction, made it more powerful when 
once it was admitted as the object of life's search. 
In the man's theory, there was no other gift, be- 
cause money purchased every thing; and so, sooner 
or later, the man's practise showed the same defect. 
If the other view of money made it appear as 
atheistic, this one, although it has a theistic tone, 
is utterly anti-Christian. For the one central fact 
of Christ and His teaching is, that God is always 
blessing men. He is with them constantly, and 
wants to be acknowledged, not only as Creator, 
but as ever-present Father. The gift of Christ, 
a new gift coming direct from heaven, gives the 
key to all of our right understanding of God. 
Money is one of many gifts ; it can purchase none 



178 Gift and Purchase. 

of the others : thy money perish with thee, if thou 
thinkest that the gift of God can be purchased 
with money. It may turn in every direction, but 
it cannot get out of its own sphere. There must 
be no mercenary giving, to quiet conscience, to 
buy the way into heaven, to obtain the right to 
be more eager about getting money. Those 
things must come direct from God's hand. You 
cannot buy them, no matter how earnestly you 
claim that money is God's gift. You must look 
right to Him for an easy conscience by knowledge 
of His love, His forgiveness. His guiding graces ; 
you must get heaven by loving and serving Him 
to whom heaven belongs, and who constitutes its 
joys ; you must obtain Church privileges by devo- 
tion to Him who founded the Church, and shed His 
blood for it ; you must gain earnestness and zeal 
in life by the presence and inspiration of that Holy 
Spirit who shall guide it, keep it from sin, and 
make it truly successful. Then, giving and the 
use of money will be free from selfishness, if the 
thought of God's constant shower of blessings is 
vivid by the knowledge of Christ revealing to us 
the Father's love. 

It is because of this that nothing but definite, 
positive Christianity can meet the dangers of a 
money-getting life and time. Christ alone tells 
of God's constant presence and constant gift. 



Gift and Purchase. 179 

When Tetzel's sale of indulgences stirred to the 
spirit of reformation the mighty soul of a Luther, 
it was more than a temporary issue, — it was a 
great battle in a war in which we all have a part. 
It touched a great danger of the modern mercan- 
tile times that were opening. Luther preached 
Christ, and that faith in Him alone brings true 
blessings. Tetzel said, " Give us the money God 
has given you, and in return you shall have God's 
other blessings of forgiveness and pardon." On 
which side is modern society, when its earnestness 
is given to the pursuit of wealth, and not to those 
other gifts, greater, more enduring, and deeper, 
which no money can buy, — the love of God, and 
the position of humble servants to Him.-^ Is there 
no need of reformation in all of us } Is there not 
need for us, with a new struggle, to look to the 
faith in Christ .'* 

And see how, once more, the relation between 
rich and poor is touched by this higher view of 
God as a constant and manifold giver. Must the 
poor man stand aside, and see his neighbor, who 
has money, go before him in opportunities of doing 
good, in acquisition of high and refined motives 
and character in life .'' From how much does the 
want of money shut him out } Of how many of 
God's gifts does it deprive him } Of but one, — 
ease of bodily relation toward his fellow-men, one 



i8o Gift and Purchase. 

of the most dangerous gifts that can be bestowed. 
Shall he stand mourning for that one, while all the 
time God waits to bestow character here, salvation 
hereafter, while moral possessions and eternal life 
are open to him, and means of doing good by per- 
sonal growth and work which wealth can never 
buy are at his hand ? And where is pride in 
wealth, — pride of the rich toward the poor? How 
many gifts has that money given? One only. All 
others are not involved in it ; they all wait on per- 
sonal connection with God, which poor as well as 
rich can gain. Acknowledge all the blessings of 
wealth, see it as God's gift ; and if that is really 
the light in which we appreciate it, if our use of 
that name for it is any thing more than an excuse 
to cover our devotion to it, it will make us fall on 
our knees the more humbly, and ask those other 
greater gifts which can come alone from that same 
beneficent hand. Then, to show how purely we 
look upon it as a gift, we shall lay it all at the feet 
of Him from whom it came ; we shall think, not 
how little, but how much, we can give ; we shall 
bring it to God, not to purchase more, but to 
show our gratitude ; we shall give it to the cause 
of Christ, who, by the gift of Himself, has taught 
us the love, the ever open-handed kindness, of God 
toward all His children. 

"Thy vcion^y perish with thee." Money is per- 



Gift and Purchase. i8i 

ishable, — perishable in substance, in form, in pos- 
session. Our souls are immortal. As the two 
come in contact here (and they are in contact in 
every life, whether it be rich or poor), the question 
is, Which shall affect the other 1 Shall we and 
our money perish together } or shall our lives, 
knowing our God, lift up the money by the devo- 
tion of us to whom it belongs 1 Shall it dazzle us 
with its glitter, and prevent our seeing God "^ or 
shall we save it by our power of serving God } We 
are the greater surely, and to us God has opened a 
path out of this bondage in which earthly things 
are forever holding us. Walk in it ; break the 
chain, golden though it be, that binds our immortal 
souls to this earth ; and seek ye first the kingdom 
of God and His righteousness, and with that gift, 
all other gifts shall be a blessing, and not a destruc- 
tion. For that kingdom, God's greatest gift, you 
are made ; be not satisfied with any life of mere 
earthly gain. 



XIII. 
THE CHRISTIAN RULE OF LIFE. 

" Aud g7-ieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed 
tinto the day of redemption.^'' — Ephesians iv. 30. 

CONDUCT is the same for all men that ever 
lived. The law of God is the rule of life ; 
and Christ, with His Gospel, imposed no new 
duties on men. But in a revelation which gives 
us special doctrines, and establishes a special in- 
stitution, and, above all, gives to us the one special 
life for our guidance and assistance, we have a 
right to ask what special conception of duty it 
has given, and what special aid to duty it has be- 
stowed. And then, in answer to that question, 
this thought, that God can be grieved at what 
we do, stands forth with peculiar originality and 
power. Men in their consciences have always 
known, that, when they do any thing wrong, they 
violate a law of action ; and so God as the law- 
giver, who says, '* Do right," has always dwelt in 
the world. Men fear for the consequences as 

they look back upon any fault in life ; and s.o God 
182 



The Christian Rule of Life. 183 

as the sovereign, who is angry with the wicked 
every day, has never been an unfamiliar figure. 
But God as one between whom and His children 
there runs the deepest sympathy, so that He is 
pained in His very soul at their wrong-doing, 
that was a conception which could come only to 
men who knew of the love of God ; it could be 
revealed only by One who could tell of the love of 
God, and of His suffering by man's sin, so that 
there never could be any doubt of it in men's 
minds afterwards. As soon as that was done, 
there was a new aspect to all God's relation to 
men. It would go everywhere. It would not re- 
main a mere doctrine in men's minds : it would 
affect men's action ; nay, it would find its way into 
the action of men who had never thought of it as 
a doctrine. That is the moral power of Christi- 
anity, which nothing else can ever have, because 
nothing else speaks of God and His presence and 
His love as do the life and death of Christ. 
"The love of Christ constraineth us;" that love 
shuts us up to a course of action, and drives us 
forward on it, because there is ever before us the 
fear that our actions will wound that love, and our 
sins grieve the heart of God, who is present with 
us by His Spirit. Supposing this exhortation to 
give the distinctively Christian asj>ect of all action, 
let us ask what special help it will be to us in the 



1 84 The Christian Rule of Life. 

struggle with the difficulties which beset all right 
action in this world. 

This new range of motive gives us clearer ideas 
of a standard of character. Our judgments of 
ourselves and of others are never very clear. We 
never can tell just what we desire or approve of 
in character, because there are ever mingled in 
our action two elements, which, for want of better 
terms, we may call business and sentiment. A 
man is dutiful, prompt, faithful, in all his action ; 
and yet men do not like him : he is not approved 
of by those who know him. He is called hard, 
mean, close, narrow ; and yet there is not a man 
who can put his finger on any neglected duty or 
unjust action. His relation to others is bad, and 
yet his duties seem to be performed. It is not 
religion alone that feels the need of something 
more : there is the acknowledgment of an inner 
ransre of action in which such a man fails. We 
feel the trouble in ourselves, as we are sometimes 
perplexed to tell on just which side our duty falls, 
— whether we ought to be just, or to be generous ; 
to pay a little more than work is worth, or to instil 
really sturdy principles of action which may be of 
great subsequent value. I suppose, that, when 
Shakspeare drew the picture of Shylock, he 
meant to show how utterly detestable a man 
may be while clamoring for a justice which 



The Christian Rule of Life. 185 

seems by all the usual laws of life to demand 
satisfaction. 

Or, again : in our own lives we want some self- 
indulgence. It seems as if we ought to be 
allowed to have it. Nobody has a right to inter- 
fere ; it is our own money that obtains it, and, if it 
does harm, we say that it injures ourselves alone. 
And yet men do judge us for it, and we judge our- 
selves. We feel guilty while we are indulging 
ourselves ; and in some subtle way that indul- 
gence seems to affect all the tone of our charac- 
ter, and influence our relations to others, ever 
after. We cannot hold ourselves as straight, or 
look at other men as boldly, as before. 

Or, in another way, we can see the same de- 
mand for an inner standard of action. There are 
two good men, and we call one holy, and to the 
other we never think of giving the title. What is 
the difference .'* One seems to have his goodness 
so a part of him that it affects every tone and 
action. It seems to be as natural to him as it is 
to the plant to grow, and to the bird to sing. It 
is a matter of feeling, and yet it is a matter of 
reality. The other man does rightly, but he does 
not seem to have his whole heart in his action, 
and lacks a depth, grace, and thoroughness which 
is very necessary for completeness. 

This universal difficulty, reaching from the way 



1 86 The Christian Rule of Life. 

in which a business-man performs some transac- 
tion up to the way in which a Christian says his 
prayer and thinks of God, shows that we all need 
some standard of action which goes far beyond all 
that is seen. We want in some way to embody 
that feeling of sentiment which is ever hanging 
around us, bewildering us, and yet not helping us. 
To such a difficulty these words, "Grieve not the 
holy Spirit of God," speaks most opportunely. 
It introduces a standard of action beyond which 
our feelings cannot wish to go ; which must 
embrace every most delicate feeling of regard for 
others' rights and wishes, which are so often 
reached with difficulty. It represents action in 
this world as something more than a thing of rules 
and laws which never quite satisfy us. But this 
world of ours, which came from the heart of a 
living God, still looks up to Him, and finds in the 
satisfaction of the wishes and longings of that 
heart its only perfection and pleasure. We are 
apt to postpone such a rule as this, and to say 
that there are other motives to which we have not 
yet begun to attain, and, when they are satis- 
fied, then this will do to lead us on to a still fur- 
ther advance toward holiness. But we lose its 
force entirely when we make it thus future. This 
is a motive which admits of no postponement, 
because it touches a range of difficulties which 



The Christian Rule of Life. 187 

belongs to every man. The act of meanness, of 
inconsiderateness, of imkindness, which our neigh- 
bor despises, and yet which our rule of duty does 
not touch, is the very one which will grieve the 
holy Spirit of God. And the higher law can, 
therefore, help us wherever we stand. Holiness 
is not a thing at which only good men should 
aim. If it is that spirit of a devoted life which 
is not measured by outward rules, it is something 
which every soul made by God has a right to 
claim. As the Bible says, "Without holiness no 
man shall see the Lord." The two go together. 
Seeing the Lord, living as in His presence, feel- 
ing that we are not only judged by His laws, but 
are measured by His spirit, who watches every 
disposition and intent of the heart, — that is holi- 
ness. It does not wait to be used as a further 
stage of moral growth : it is an element of true 
character in the very first stages. We ask its 
beginnings in the feeling of the heart, without 
which no action is satisfactory ; it goes on, grow- 
ing apace with each advance into the knowledge 
of God and the realization of His Spirit, until 
it reaches perfect oneness with Him. God's 
choicest gifts are for all morally as well as physi- 
cally, just as the child sees and uses the same 
bright sun as does the man of mature power and 
mind. 



I SB The Christian Rule of Life. 

And, now that we may be sure that such a mo- 
tive in life as our text will not lead to any one- 
sided development of feeling in life, let us see 
how far that motive goes, and how much it means, 
not to grieve the holy Spirit of God. A man is 
grieved by the action of others precisely in pro- 
portion to his knowledge and appreciation of their 
.doings, and the very sensitive man has a hard 
time in life ; he is grieved over and over again, 
■when a man of coarser mould would have never 
felt any annoyance. It is a good thing that we 
do not know all that our fellow-men are saying 
about us : our limitations are our protection. But 
God's infinite nature makes such an injunction as 
this unlimited in its application to life. He who 
:sees and knows all things is affected by every 
incident of a man's life. Those great attributes 
<of omniscience and omnipresence are, by such a 
command as this, brought into a very close con- 
:nection with us. They are not things which con- 
cern simply the work of ruling the world : they 
have a relation to all our action. The most sensi- 
tive being of the universe — He whose presence 
is everywhere, He from whom we can conceal 
nothing — must not be grieved. At once, then, 
we see that holiness is no narrow thing ; it is not 
to be reached by feeling, by prayers, by aspira- 
tions, alone. God is grieved at sin, for He is 



The Christian RiUe of Life. 189 

holy ; He is grieved when we do not bow the knee 
in worship to Him, for He asks the adoration and 
submission of His children ; He is grieved at the 
failure of charity and assistance toward those 
about us, for He is infinitely kind. But He is 
grieved also at the neglect of duty, at negligence 
and sloth, for He is the great Master, ever work- 
ing Himself, and giving us His work to do ; He is 
grieved at ignorance and carelessness and impru- 
dence, no matter how good the cause in which 
they are shown, for He is the God of wisdom, 
sensitive to every foolish action in all this world 
of men. 

Take the right motive for holiness, the desire 
and thought of the presence of God, and there 
can be nothing so far-reaching. It embraces all 
our work ; it urges us on, mentally as well as mor- 
ally. It can never become an impracticable, high- 
flown thing which the common sense of the world 
so often despises. Its respect is for God's feeling, 
and it never can get out of His sight.. It adds 
warmth and feeling to life ; but as it does so, it 
loses not one particle of the sturdiest traits of 
character, which the world has learned to respect 
and to demand for all true life. Only God is thus 
worthy of man's regard, because He alone covers 
all life. We have our thought for others, — no 
one in this life quite gets beyond some feeling 



IQO 77?^ Christian Rule of Life. 

of respect for the opinion of others. And see 
how character rises as the circle of surrounding 
critics enlarges ! The man who feels that but 
few people know him and care for him, is particu- 
lar in the relations where those people touch him. 
The man widely known, whose face is at once rec- 
ognized, can never shift his responsibility ; and 
his character is compacted by that constant sense 
of obligation. God does not leave us thus to wait 
until we have gained some position, which shall 
be in itself the means of moral strength ; that 
would be to condemn most of the world to more 
or less moral carelessness. But He says to every 
man, woman, and child, '^I surround you always, 
and am grieved at every single deviation of every 
kind, in word or thought, from the path of highest 
wisdom and right." What an incentive that is to 
all action ! more effective than any earthly posi- 
tion which we may gain, because it touches the 
heart, where men cannot see ; wider than any 
human relation, because it applies to all men, is 
this power of the true knowledge of God in life. 
It is a treasure, and not a hardship. It consoli- 
dates character ; it brings all action to one test ; 
it alone is the true promise of symmetrical living. 
As God lives, we live; and as new secrets of 
His existence break upon us, we find some new 
point of sensitiveness in Him, which we must not 



The Christian Rule of Life. 191 

griev^e; and so a new portion of our life is joined 
to the domain which is being taken from sin, and 
given to the rule of righteousness. 

Another great motive in life is self-interest. 
It does great things for men, and the things 
which it does are sometimes very good and some- 
times very bad ; but it is a motive with which 
we cannot dispense, and so this new motive of a 
desire not to grieve the Spirit of God by our 
action must have something to say to that. If 
the only real interest of a man is to succeed 
in earthly pleasure, I suppose that we cannot 
expect much help from this new motive ; but if 
we do all grant that a man's best interest is to 
be growing morally as well as physically and 
materially, that description of the Spirit of God 
as that by which we are sealed unto the day of 
redemption does tell us that it is for our interest 
to hold closely to this motive of action. For the 
seal is for two purposes : it protects the document 
to which it is placed, as well as the owner who 
places it there. It insures from violent treat- 
ment the very paper on which it is placed, and 
keeps for it the dignified position which its use 
has bestowed upon it. It gives it a new character, 
and tells men to be careful how they treat it. 
You see the sealed documents of old times repos- 
ing in the State archives, strong in that seal which 



192 The Christian Rule of Life. 

speaks so loudly of the purpose long since accom- 
plished, and of the sovereign long since dead. 
Men respect that mark, and the very material itself 
seems changed by the new position that is given 
it. Through disturbed and dangerous times that 
seal has brought it safely. Men who could not 
read it saw that, and it commanded respect ; and 
now it has the weight of historical interest upon 
it which makes it really valuable. 

Some such figure seems to bring self-interest 
to bear upon this motive of good action. How 
shall a man, who has felt the desire to serve 
his God, live until the day of redemption, until 
the day of safety and honor .? It is not easy. 
There are attacks from without, there are doubts 
and difficulties from within. Sometimes he him- 
self wonders whether he is in any way different 
from men who never think of God and of Christ ; 
his actions seem to have no weight and no special 
motive or character to them. Then comes in 
this motive. The Spirit of God has been given 
to each man as his mark of the new life. It 
claims him for God, and it is his protection. 
When the man sins, he grieves that, and to sin is 
to break or injure the seal. The sin may not seem 
a very great one, but that result is to make it 
appear detestable. For it turns back to old times ; 
it spoils in the man's own heart that sense of 



The Christian Rule of Life. 193 

belonging to God, which is his truest protection ; 
it makes him seem to other men as if he had no 
thought above the world. The Spirit is grieved ; 
the force of its protection is weakened, and the 
man is an easier prey to the next attack. Seen 
in this light, this motive in life gives a reason 
for that fact which we all know only too well, 
— that one sin prepares the way for others ; each 
sin tends to break that relation to God which 
is the only safeguard against all sin. 

To resist any temptation in any way is a great 
thing ; the struggle of any soul away from sin up 
to righteousness is a thing over which angels must 
rejoice, and with which men must sympathize. 
Even if the weapon of which the poor, distressed 
soul lays hold is some common one of worldly 
policy, it is still a great battle, and that resource 
came from God also, and has divine possibilities 
within it. But when the man refuses to sin be- 
cause he is conscious that the Spirit of God is 
with him, and has marked him for its own, then 
surely he has taken a great step forward in moral 
character and dignity, and attained a position 
which is worth any sacrifice which he has been 
called to make. We have a long march,' and 
many battles to fight, before the day of redemp- 
tion comes. It is impossible for us to see what 
emergencies are before us. We do not want just 



194 T^^^^ Christian Rule of Life. 

to succeed in any battle, and to come out of it not 
quite sure whether the victory was worth the loss 
sustained : we want to feel that our moral battles 
are making us really stronger, and that each one 
is an advance to a new position. We do not want 
to be like poor paupers, who feel that they have 
survived another day without starving, but we 
want each day to be adding to our moral position 
and resources. And such growth is in a motive 
of life and action which respects and glories in 
the seal of God upon us, and makes it a reality 
to ourselves and to others. Such a view of self- 
interest as that is not selfishness : it has the very 
power of true manliness in it. 

The sorrow of God, that is an idea which no 
one would have dared to use so boldly, as a motive 
of life, but He who set up the Cross as the symbol 
of His religion. It involves that union of authority 
and love which Christ has alone been able to real- 
ize. But how often that sorrow must arise as the 
sight of sin and suffering comes to the eyes of 
Him, who loves all His children ! Is it not the 
noblest of purposes to make that sorrow less, — to 
give up sin, to convert sinners, to teach men so to 
live, and so to live ourself, that God's sight of His 
world shall not open again the flood of tears that 
were shed at Lazarus' grave, nor renew the suffer- 
ings of Gethsemane and Calvary in the experience 



The Christian Rule of Life. 195 

of the grieved Spirit ? That is work large enough 
for life, and embracing all men in its results. Do 
it in the name and power of the Cross of Christ, 
who, suffering once for sins, told us of the love for 
us and the hatred of sin that belonged to our 
Father in heaven. Then our personal struggles 
are no mere transient matters, which help us for 
the time, and have no significance beyond our own 
experience : they are real and permanent additions 
to the sum of achievement, which shall make God, 
and the world, which is His, glad forever, and 
successful in those plans which reach to eternity. 



XIV. 
THE USE OF THE BIBLE. 

" For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for 
onr leariiing, that we through patience and comfort of the Scrip- 
tures might have hope ^ — Romans xv. 4. 

THE Scriptures are meant to give us patience 
and comfort. That is the word of our text 
and of our collect for the second Sunday in Ad- 
vent. If we appreciate that fact, it will influence 
very greatly our use of the Scriptures. We want 
comfort, therefore Bible-reading will not be a hard- 
ship ; we shall persevere in it through the midst 
of all difficulties and doubts. Patience means 
steady continuance, therefore we shall find that 
Bible-reading must not be a fitful thing, but a 
steady habit of life, with a good reason behind it. 
Reading our Bible does not save us : belief in 
Christ does that ; following and obeying Him is 
the source of eternal life. But the Bible is a help 
to us, and therefore to neglect it shows that we 
do not appreciate our salvation, since we are not 
willing to take every means to make it a full and 
perfect thing. What view of the Bible, then, can 
196 



The Use of the Bible. 197 

help us use it better, and make it more truly to us 
a source of patience and comfort ? 

The Bible has its own character, which makes it 
stand by itself as a means of grace. That charac- 
ter is given very distinctly to the Scriptures, in 
our text. St. Paul is speaking, of course, of the 
Old-Testament Scriptures, which were all that 
the Church possessed then ; but the same char- 
acter belongs equally to all the Christian writings 
that have been added to those former Scrip- 
tures. They were written by men for God's pur- 
pose. They are God's word, but they come to 
us through men. The greater part of the Bible 
is history ; all of it was written by men who, 
when they were writing, were absorbed by their 
own circumstances and surroundings. They never 
thought of us as they wrote, though in God's 
knowledge they were writing for us. Had they 
attempted to write for future generations, they 
would have miserably failed, just as any man 
fails who is too conscious of the watchful eyes 
of men. They did their work under God's guid- 
ance, with the condition that belongs to all genu- 
ine human work, by throwing their whole being 
into the emergency of the times. And so the 
whole Bible comes to us glowing with human 
interest. We go to it to learn of God, and out of 
every page comes the hand of a brother to lead us 



198 The Use of the Bible. 

into God's presence. God speaks to us by the Spirit 
in our hearts, and God speaks to us by the Spirit in 
His Bible. But the two voices are not the 
same ; they say the same things, but differently, 
so as to meet different wants. One is the reve- 
lation of God which belongs to ourselves alone, 
and makes us feel our individual position before 
God as truly as if we alone stood on this globe in 
His sight, and as if we were the only men that 
had ever lived ; the other puts us before Him just 
as truly, but with a great multitude of saints 
and sinners that have gone before us. The Bible 
might have been spoken out of heaven ; but, if it 
had been, it would have been very different from 
our present book. To the multitude of men what 
was thus said would have been incomprehensible ; 
just as, when a voice came to Jesus out of heaven, 
the multitude said that it thundered, and not one 
besides Christ seems to have discerned the mean- 
ing of those sounds. So the intelligibleness of the 
Bible is in having it spoken to us by human lips. 

When we bear in mind this human element, can 
we not understand how the Bible is for patience 
and comfort ? What makes a man so patient under 
tribulation as the example and story of those who, 
men, like himself, have endured and conquered .-* 
No proverbs, no human wisdom, no deepest truths 
of Divine wisdom, can help him as does the embodi- 



The Use of the Bible. 199 

ment of Divine wisdom in human action. And in 
trouble what comforts a man so much as human 
sympathy ; the knowledge that others feel with 
him ; the grasp of a hand, or the presence of a 
friend, who does not say much, but simply makes 
himself felt as present ? And so, when the Bible 
places us in the midst of men who have been 
through just such lives as ours, as by its long 
sketches of history it makes us feel that we are 
not alone, there is comfort of the Scriptures. For 
its proper use, then, the Bible says, Know the men 
who wrote it, and the men whose story it con- 
tains. Enter into its human element. Do not 
take its contents as mysterious words, which, in 
one way or another, you do not know just how, 
came down out of heaven. But be impressed with 
its naturalness. It is printed in the same way 
and on the same presses as all other books ; it lies 
on our tables in the midst of other books, look- 
ing very much like them all. It comes into our 
houses as a human guest ; its form is a pledge to 
us of God's nearness ; its mingling with us is a 
proof to us of the way in which religion can min- 
gle with our lives. It never frightens us ; it is 
meant for all men, for all can appreciate its sweet 
humanity, just as all men could be charmed with 
the words and acts of Jesus of Nazareth. It is 
God's word : no view of the human element in it 



200 The Use of the Bible. 

ever depreciates that fact. But God's word is 
never sweeter and more attractive than when it 
clothes itself with human life ; we know that, 
from the lives that are around us, filled with 
God's inspiring breath ; we know it, above all, 
from that Word of God which was made flesh and 
dwelt among us, and whose history is most fit- 
tingly made known to us through our human 
Bible. 

Let us see how this view of the Bible, if borne 
in mind, will meet many of our difficulties in its 
use. In the first place, it accounts for the differ- 
ent ways in which men use their Bibles at differ- 
ent times. At one time a man wants to read it 
devoutly ; at another he wants to study it. At 
one time he wants to see the full connection in 

which a verse stands, and to look at it in all its 

• 

lights; at another he just wants to take it to his 
heart for comfort, repeat it over and over again, 
and have it speak to him the truth that it holds in 
the simplest way. These two uses are not at all 
inconsistent : they support each other. For that 
is the way in which we deal with men about us. 
At one time our relation to a man is one of 
deepest thought ; we ask a friend's advice, we 
study his words, we look at his position, and weigh 
all that he says, and think over it deeply. At 
another time all that we ask is the calm repose of 



The Use of the Bible. 201 

friendship. We are satisfied with the very fact of 
his presence. We take some word of his to our- 
selves, for the friendship and comfort with which 
it is fraught ; we repeat it over ; we rely upon it. 
We can use a man in any honest way that we 
please. The more we have studied into him and 
his words, the deeper can be our reliance upon 
him in times when we do not want study, but sim- 
ple rest and faith. Friendship and knowledge are 
not to be divorced : the friendship that dreads 
knowledge is a poor, trembling thing; the knowl- 
edge that never goes into friendship is as unpro- 
ductive as the iciness of an arctic plain. 

Since, then, the Bible is a human book, all we 
have to do is to approach it as men. The dictates 
of our humanity will tell us how we shall go to it. 
Our hearts can cling to it, because in no part of it 
is there wanting a human heart. Words, of which 
we do not understand the full meaning, can com- 
fort us, just as some man much wiser and deeper 
than we are can be a strength to us in life. And 
our minds can be active over it without disrespect, 
because every thing in it is from a human pen, and 
asks for a deeper acquaintance. The more we 
love it, the more we shall study it ; and as we 
study it, our lives will grow into sympathy with it. 
If, then, any man has been a student of the Bible, 
but not a lover of it, let him remember that true 



202 The Use of the Bible. 

sympathy is necessary for true study ; if he has 
been a reader, but not a student, let him know that 
as he enters into its facts, and knows his brother 
in it, the more will he understand God's leading 
of that brother, and the better will he be able to 
follow God's leading himself. 

People often speak of the difficult or profitless 
passages in the Bible, and say that they prevent 
their use of it, and are stumbling-blocks in the way 
of their feet. They instance the genealogies, and 
say, "What good can they do us?" They quote 
the song of Deborah, and say, ** Is that good teach- 
ing ?" They speak of the prophesies, and ask how 
they, busy men, can get time to study them so as 
to understand them. Here is a difficulty that this 
human view of the Bible takes away. All parts of 
the Bible are not alike, just as all parts of human 
life are not alike, pleasing or instructive. I read a 
man's book, and it charms me ; I meet the man, 
and perhaps his manners produce precisely the 
opposite effect. I care for the poet when he sings, 
I do not care for him when he eats and sleeps ; 
and yet the very fact that he is a man, living just 
as I live, having the same desires to satisfy, is the 
very thing that makes him able to stir my soul 
by his song, and so the meanest fact of his life 
has deepest significance. But, after all, it is the 
poem that he writes that I care for most. So 



The Use of the Bible. 203 

with our Bible : it is human ; it passes through 
every degree of human experience, from the lowest 
to the highest. No part of it is without instruc- 
tion, but all in it is not alike. The shell of hu- 
man life is valuable : it is the kernel of Divine 
truth that nourishes. Shall we reject Christ's 
words because the genealogies of Chronicles seem 
to be unsatisfying ^ There is enough in the Bible 
that is plain, enough that is true to a Divine inspi- 
ration ; use that. There are things in St. Paul's 
Epistles that are hard to be understood, so said 
St. Peter ; but there are words of Christ's that 
were the salvation of that apostle. Begin the 
Bible, and use it where it touches you, and is plain ; 
from that go forward. It is all useful : every detail 
in it will help to the appreciation of the deepest 
wisdom that ever fell from the Master's lips; 
every life in it will shed light on His great sacri- 
fice ; every prophecy has truth in it. Every gene- 
alogy has its lesson, even, but to him who uses 
it rightly, and comes at it in the way which God 
shows him. The Bible is as varied as human life. 
It is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for cor- 
rection, for instruction in righteousness. Christ 
towers above all in it ; and no genealogy, or song, 
or prophecy will ever be an excuse that we have not 
learned in it of Him. " Come unto Me " are words 
perfectly intelligible, though we may understand 



204 ^^^^ ^^^ of ^^^ Bible, 

but little about preaching to the souls in prison, 
or baptism for the dead. The Bible's difficulties 
are but proofs of its nearness to our daily life, 
which itself is simple in its plain facts and duties, 
but full of dark places with its hard problems. 

But men have used their Bibles so much, and 
they tire of them ; they read them through and 
through, and then say that they know them. 
Familiarity and monotony sadly affect our Bible- 
reading. It is not a large book, and it is the same 
thing over and over again. If the Bible is a mere 
text-book, such a thing is perfectly conceivable ; 
its words are heard, and then they are known. 
But, if it is God speaking in human life, how can 
we ever be done with it "^ Are you done with your 
friends .-* Do you turn them off, as exhausted, and 
look for others } Is there the meanest life of 
which you can say that you know every thing in 
it } You change year by year, and your Bible will 
change with you. Your new position in life will 
make you see the life there in a new position. 
You read, or had read to you, as a child, the story 
of David and Goliath. It was a story of adventure 
and heroism, and so it was fascinating. A little 
later it was the simple reliance on God by the 
stripling alone from a faithless army that was at- 
tractive. Farther on, your knowledge and experi- 
ence made you see the contest as the first starting 



The Use of the Bible. 205 

forth of Israel's life to return to its God after 
days of degeneracy and disgrace. And so the 
story has gone on, gathering new meaning as the 
significance of it as a part of God's dealing with 
man, and man's struggle toward his God, became 
evident. This is one of the lowest examples. 
We could trace them all up to the growth, year by 
year, of the significance of that wonderful story of 
the great Saviour. It is never the same ; it has 
life in it, and so has the whole Bible. It waits 
to bestow new blessings. We grow up into it, 
and so can read it over and over again. Our own 
life is ever new to us, and its life is ever new to 
our life. There is a human spirit in it that makes 
it belong to all persons at all times who have the 
breath of human life within them. The child and 
the gray-haired saint read over the same words ; 
and they appeal to both, as far as their under- 
standings can comprehend them, because there is 
human life in both. The Bible goes with us at all 
times : it has the power of all true literature in it. 
But it has more than that in it : it is God's hand 
in human life, — the greatest fact of all life, — and 
so belongs to all men ; it is the history of His 
dealing with men, leading up to that crowning 
point of the revelation of Jesus Christ. And 
therefore the Bible has the charm of human life 
leading men up to God. 



2o6 The Use of the Bible. 

There is another set of difficulties in connection 
with the Bible that closes it to more or less men 
to-day, — those arising from the doubts that have 
been thrown upon it. It has been criticised ; 
crude and false statements as to scientific facts 
are said to have been found in it ; discrepancies in 
dates and numbers have been discussed in it. 
And many men, without knowing much about 
what has been discovered and said about all these 
points, just feel that their faith is distracted, and 
that they cannot read their Bibles as they once 
could. But what opened the Bible to such attacks 
was the neglect of its specific character as His 
revelation of Himself through men. It was con- 
sidered to be God's infallible word, like the revela- 
tion of the laws of morality, and as truly and 
literally as the word which the Spirit speaks to the 
heart of every Christian. Every word from cover 
to cover was perfectly, literally, and absolutely 
true. The whole view of the Bible was wrong, 
since it made no allowance for its human element, 
and for the nature of its transmission as a human 
medium of God's presence. No wonder that it was 
attacked. No wonder that men, finding facts in 
God's book of nature that opposed statements in 
this absolutely true book of the Bible, brought the 
two in contact. It was right in them to do so ; it 
was the best thing they could do. It led men to 



The Use of the Bible. 207 

look into their Bibles, and understand what they 
were. It opened the whole field of biblical criti- 
cism that is ours to-day. The Bible began to be 
studied in its proper relations. Its books and its 
authors and its facts were investigated. It was 
seen that there must be the imperfections of 
human life in a human book. It was seen that 
each age wrote the book of its time truly and in its 
own spirit. A new set of facts came to light by 
this larger knowledge. As increased knowledge 
brought new facts, it increased Bible-study. Sci- 
ence said, God does not lead man. New study of 
the Bible showed wondrous facts of His leading, 
which science of inanimate nature could not un- 
derstand, and, above all, could not rival. Those 
facts were what the Bible were to teach. It be- 
came the Bible of a living humanity ; it became a 
richer book than it ever was before ; texts came 
out in new light ; the very darkness showed the 
stars; it culminated in importance as it reached 
those facts of Christ, His character. His life, His 
death, which no science could explain, and which 
have become firmer as time has gone on, and knowl- 
edge has grown. The attacks were hard, but they 
were full of blessing. They have made it easier 
to use the Bible than ever before. It is not the 
old, mysterious book it was, a sad trial to our faith. 
We can read it now, and get patience and comfort 



2o8 The Use of the Bible. 

from it. Once it was a book full of detached 
sayings : now it is a living body. A good deal of 
superstitious regard for it has happily vanished. 
Men do not open it now at random, and feel that 
the text the eye first glances at is the one that 
is wanted. It is used intelligently ; men know 
its parts, and, when they want a text, turn to it 
with ready and knowing hands. Books on its 
interpretation and its use fill our libraries. Lives 
of Christ guide devout souls to true knowledge of 
the life that the Bible can alone give in its sim- 
plicity. In estimating the amount of Bible-reading 
to-day, account must be made of all that reading of 
books about the Bible which bring out the treas- 
ures of its pages more richly than ever before. 

The whole lesson of these times of doubt and 
discussion has been, that we must read our Bibles 
more diligently and intelligently than ever before. 
The times demand that ; they are full of blessing 
to him who does do it. Above all, we must read 
our Bibles as God gave them to us; we must know 
what the Bible is, and see how great a blessing 
God has given us in a book where religion shall 
meet us in its sweetest and most human form, and 
show itself as a guide to our lives here. The spirit 
of the times tells us to be very careful how we use 
it. Use it wrongly, with mere formalism, with 
blind and careless superstition, and there are men 



The Use of the Bible. 209 

waiting who are only too anxious to make it your 
destruction, as they shake your faith in it by 
doubts regarding it. But use it as a man, put 
your heart to it just as you are, and it will bless 
you, and no man can take it from you. If you are 
a man whose life allows you to study it, do it faith- 
fully ; and, in these days of widespread biblical 
study and knowledge, who has not this chance in 
a degree just suited to his opportunities and abili- 
ties } In your devout reading of it, put your soul 
into it, as a man who wants to be led as God has 
led other men, and your use of it will defend it for 
yourself and others. You will have it in your 
soul, where it cannot be taken away. 

We often dwell upon our attachment to the 
Bible on account of its associations. It is the 
book of our race. It has been the strength of 
our Anglo-Saxon literature that the Bible was 
behind it. Its power has shown itself in strange 
emergencies, and many a text has new power in 
it on account of its use at some critical time in 
our past history. Memories of those who have 
lived and died in the strength which they gained 
from it cluster around every page, and favorite 
passages bring to our minds those who loved and 
marked them. Stories from its books still have 
tones in them that were dear to us as they first 
opened to us the treasures of Scripture. See how 



210 The Use of the Bible. 

like gathers to like. The great human assistance 
draws the sweetest human memories to it, and 
some saint of our own household joins his tones 
to the noble song or simple story of the Hebrew 
prophet and evangelist ; and deep answereth to 
deep. May we add heartily our voices to the great 
chorus, and make the Bible richer, because it has 
led us, too, in the path of life ! Do not make it a 
mere ornament of life : it cannot be content with 
such a place ; it is too earnest and deep a gift for 
that. Struggle with all your might toward heaven, 
and this will help you ; long with all your heart 
to know Christ, and this will teach you ; strive 
with all your heart to love God, and this will show 
Him to you ; aspire with all your being to reach 
the perfection which God has offered to the human 
character, and this book will make you one of a 
long line of prophets and kings, men, women, and 
children, who, by His guidance, have been going 
on to the city of God. You, through patience and 
comfort of the Scriptures, shall have hope. 



XV. 
THE USE OF PRAYER. 

" Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father in my name, He will give it 
youy — John xvi. 23. 

PRAYER is the action by which a man realizes 
and utilizes the upward and heavenly relation 
of his life. It speaks of a dependence in life other 
and greater than the facts and powers of the world 
about us. As the world, with its cares and its 
pleasures, recedes, prayer always becomes more 
prominent as a feature of true life. There have 
been ages of prayer in the world's history, — times 
when men gave themselves up to lives of prayer. 
They were days when the course of the world was 
so identified with wickedness that the only safety 
for a man who dreaded the destruction to his soul 
which life in the world threatened, was to separate 
himself from it, and to give himself to a life of 
prayer. Both by the life from which he fled, and 
by the life in which he took refuge, the hermit 
witnessed to the division between the power of the 
world and prayer. Devotion of a less ascetic type, 

211 



212 The Use of Prayer. 

— that which belongs to the ordinary man — is 
said in these days to have diminished, as the calls 
of life and the knowledge of the powers of this 
world and of the earth have enlarged. As life 
matures in the individual, prayer too often be- 
comes less frequent. As the cares and pleasures 
of the world enter, childhood's habits are gradually 
abandoned, and a working life is supposed to be 
the proper substitute for a praying life. In family 
life, with perfect complacency the father leaves 
to the mother the church-going and the devotional 
training of the family's life. *' I am too busy," or 
** I must rest, so as to be ready for to-morrow's 
duties," is a line of defence for such action which 
is supposed to be perfectly impregnable, and 
behind which many a man has taken his shelter, 
and almost forgotten that he ever occupied a dif- 
ferent position. Some memories of the habits of 
childhood float through the mind ; but they seem 
almost to come from another existence, as they 
speak of a time when worldly, powers and worldly 
cares were not the absorbing things of life. 

But, in all this recognition of the world, both of 
matter and of circumstance, as a great absorbing 
and monopolizing power, there is one point at 
which prayer makes itself a more reasonable and 
necessary thing than ever before. It is the point 
of the controlling power which still remains in the 



The Use of Prayer. 2 1 3 

will and soul of the individual man or woman. 
Put two men, two women, two boys, two girls, in 
precisely the same position, the same motives of 
profit surrounding them, the same circumstances 
drawing and pushing them, and gradually they 
draw apart. They will not, they can not, follow 
the same line. The characters within them begin 
to tell ; the soul of each asserts itself. One uses, 
the other neglects, his opportunities; one takes 
the right, the other the wrong ; one sees all things 
from a mean, the other from a noble, point of view. 
The action of that hidden will, that internal power, 
is so important, that we are often inclined to exag- 
gerate it, and to think that it acted, when it really 
did not, and when external circumstances really 
determined the path of motion. We look back 
over our lives, and see, that, at many points where 
we thought that we were choosing, we really had 
very little to do with the direction in which we 
moved. Our parentage, our training, our educa- 
tion, our necessities, were making up our decision. 
But all the more important become those moments 
when we did and do make those decisions ; more 
and more valuable in proportion to the mass of 
the world's life about us, which is ever influencing 
us, becomes that power which shall regulate it, 
just as the rudder of the ship becomes of all the 
more importance as the wind and the waves are 



214 The Use of Prayer, 

strong and the ship is great. And that power 
declares itself distinctly as a moral power. 

Our inclinations for ease, and our desire for 
profit, those the world is ever ruling and influ- 
encing. They are akin to the desire of the animal 
for rest, and the tendency of the plant toward 
growth. External motives are forever influencing 
them. But the determination for or against the 
right is a moral action, in which the soul itself 
speaks, and in which it is called to set itself 
against the ruling forces of the world, to decide 
for the seen against the unseen, for character 
rather than ease, for permanent benefit rather 
than immediate gain. Such moments, however 
few they may be, really make up the heroic part 
of a man's life. The lives in which they are most 
evident as moving forces are those which consti- 
tute the world's richest treasure ; they are the lives 
of true human power. These moments, when the 
will asserts itself as the real force of human life, 
need assistance and support, and all the more so 
on account of their position in the midst of a mate- 
rial world which grudgingly admits their reality 
and necessity. When our bodily appetites impel 
us to seek food, here is creation all about us, offer- 
ing the precise supply for those appetites ; when 
the tired brain of man seeks relief, the beauty 
of nature opens the way to quiet and refreshing 



The Use of Prayer. 215 

thought ; when the social side of man demands 
satisfaction, he finds it ready at hand in all the 
associations of companionship with his fellow-man ; 
when his restless ambition pushes him forward, 
he finds the combinations of human life opening 
paths to pre-eminence of various kinds. But when 
his moral power would demand the assertion of 
the will of his undying soul, where shall he look, 
if not to his Father's will, from which he camp, 
and to which all his efforts belong ? There alone 
can be found the supply of strength to that, for 
which no other view of life has a word of encour- 
agement, and which all other powers of the world 
would leave lonely and helpless. The man who 
neglects prayer because life is so busy, the man 
who never thinks of God because there is so much 
else to be thought of, burdens his life with a sad 
contradiction. It is just because of those two 
facts that the best part of him needs to bring him 
to his knees in the presence of his Father. It is 
because the bustle of the world is so great, drown- 
ing the still voice of his own heart, that he needs 
the quiet of the closet, where the world is shut out, 
and he can understand what the true power of life 
really is. It is the very increase of knowledge 
of the world's resources, the very multiplication of 
the world's activities, in these days, which ought 
to make our prayers deeper and more constant. 



2i6 Th3 Use of Prayer. 

It is the very fact that human activity has been 
vindicated from the taint of necessary violence and 
wickedness, which belonged to it in ruder times, 
which ought to put us on our guard against being 
swept away by the force of its swiftly moving cur- 
rent. The man who prays is the man who enno- 
bles himself. He turns deliberately from material 
to moral power. As he asserts the power of God, 
he, as the child of God, lays claim to power for 
Himself. The humility of prayer leads, like all 
genuine humility, to the deepening of true 
character. 

This view of prayer, as connected with the exer- 
cise of will in our own lives, helps us with regard 
to the answers which we may expect to receive to 
our prayers. We pray, and yet we have to work 
with proper means, that the very result for which 
we have asked may be reached. We pray, and 
that for which we pray often seems long in com- 
ing, and sometimes seems to be brought by meth- 
ods apart from God's special work for us. And 
just so we find our wills working in this world, 
often complicated so closely with things over 
which we have no control, that we find it impos- 
sible to tell how much of what we have done is 
owing to ourselves, and how much to the inevitable 
circumstances of our life. We use the ordinary 
methods of life for the promotion of those objects 



The Use of Prayer, 217 

on which our will is fixed ; and there is no greater 
encouragement in all life than to learn, that, when 
that will is really in the true path of righteousness, 
it finds a thousand motives and means in ordinary 
life by which to strengthen itself, and accomplish 
its purposes. At times that will of ours must as- 
sert itself in all the solitariness of its supremacy ; 
but it is alive and working, not only then, but 
when it is using and guiding all the events of life 
to the true end of its and their existence. When, 
then, that will rejoices in prayer, to gain the sup- 
port and assistance of our Father's will, shall it 
not expect to find in Him the same rich and fruit- 
ful variety of working .'* The will of God, in answer 
to the request of our prayer, may and does flash 
out at times the answer with all the readiness of a 
personal soul. Such answers will come most fre- 
quently in matters of our own spiritual life, where 
heart can act directly upon heart, where our cry 
for comfort or pardon or strength can receive the 
immediate response from Him who knows all our 
thoughts. But we bring our other wants to Him, 
we put before Him the whole range of our wishes 
and desires; for in them all mingles that will of 
ours, which needs strength and assistance. The 
answer will come in the purifying of our own wills 
from those things which are not good for us. It 
will come through those same channels which He 



2i8 The Use of Prayer, 

has Himself ordained, — the activity of our life, the 
events of the world about us, the circumstances of 
ordinary existence. That is the highest will which 
can turn things to its own purposes ; which can, 
out of the most untoward circumstances, bring the 
result which is desired ; which in contradictory con- 
ditions sees its greatest opportunity. And, when 
the cry of affection goes up for the prolonged life 
of one who is dear, God shows His greatest power 
when He gives that life in a higher and better 
form, even though He does not spare the blow of 
bodily death, which is the lot of all men here. 
Those answers of God to our prayers which lead 
us up to higher views of life and its happiness are 
surely His best answers. Those answers in which 
He claims for Himself all the ordinary processes 
of the world's life are surely the most encouraging 
answers. They are the ones most in accordance 
with our mode of life here ; they are the ones 
which give us the most boldness to claim for the 
cause of righteousness the most discouraging cir- 
cumstances ; they are the ones which show us 
how Divine is the law by which we work in this 
world. It is not a poor arrangement, to which we 
must grudgingly submit, — this constant struggle 
with adverse circumstances, this imperceptible 
blending of our wills with the order of the world 
about us : it is God's own method. And when, in 



* The Use of Prayer. 219 

answer to our prayer, no miraculous answer comes, 
our faith can let us know that we have found one 
of those points in which God's will will work less 
directly, but as surely, toward the end which He 
has in view, — our rescue and salvation. With such 
a God, we can be more patient when our wills are 
called to work under the same restrictions ; we can 
understand the equal power of self-assertion and 
of self-abnegation ; we can be ready for either the 
moment of unimpeded and instant action, or for 
that of steady, wise, and cautious adjustment of 
all life's forces toward their proper end. So the 
promise of Christ, with its great comprehensive- 
ness, is true : ''Whatsoever ye shall ask the Father 
in my name, He will give it you." Always surely, 
but not always as we think, leading our wants to 
their highest aspects, teaching us to honor more, 
as of His ordering, the life in which we live, the 
answer will come whenever prayer is our will 
going for assistance to the will of our Father. 

And just as unlimited is the command to pray. 
Prayer is for all men. Of course, the will of the 
distressed and suffering man needs help and 
strength ; and so, in their troubles, men pray : 
and poor men and dying men are supposed to find 
special comfort in that exercise. But it is equally 
for the strong man in the current of life that 
prayer is necessary. That is precisely the man 



220 The Use of Prayer, ' 

who is most in danger of losing his soul, of think- 
ing that his will is strong, and is ordering his life, 
when really it is his life and its necessities which 
are ordering his will, and leading it an ignorant 
and ignominious captive. The man who has be- 
come identified with his own success, who looks 
upon every thing from the point of view of where 
he stands to-day, is the man who more than any 
other needs to enter each day's activity with 
the thought of the nature of his life, as it is in the 
sight of God ; needs to end each day with the re- 
view of his life, as it is freed of all its temporary 
surroundings ; needs to separate the weeks with 
the day of worship and prayer ; needs to break in 
on the weeks and days with hours of devotion and 
of thought of God. Prayer is for such men almost 
more than any others. It is for men of to-day 
more than it was for monks and hermits of old. 
It is for the men as much as it is for the women. 
And, therefore, it has no limits of time or place. 
Those are conditions of material things ; and, for 
the sake of asserting the victory of the spiritual 
over the material, we consecrate special times and 
places of prayer. But, as a spiritual exercise, it 
has no such limits. Quicker than the lightning 
flash the soul of man can place itself in the pres- 
ence of its Father. Without moving from where 
he is, the man can converse with his God. He is a 



The Use of Prayer. 221 

free man, although he stands to men's eyes, for 
the time, in the chains of his earthly conditions. 
You see him as the world makes him ; but, by 
the power of prayer, he is ever summoning to his 
aid, against the world, the flesh, and the devil, a 
power which is greater than them all. 

But, in such a world as ours, prayer is not easy. 
It never will be, because the whole tendency of 
life is to obliterate our sense of independent will, 
and to make us the creatures of circumstances. 
And then, when our will is gone, we doubt 
whether God has any personal will, whether He, 
too, is not governed by the world which He has 
made. The assistance to prayer must meet us at 
that point of personal knowledge. So, in our text, 
Christ offered Himself to His disciples. It was in 
His name that they were to ask the Father. He 
was known to them as the one who had stood out 
against the mastery of the world's life at every 
point. His approaching death, by which He was 
to defy the world, and to open eternal life, was to 
complete the work. He had told them of their 
ability to do the same ; and in all His exhortations 
to be born again, to take up the cross, to lose their 
life that they might find it. He had pointed them 
to the one path of real human power. He had 
told them of God's being and love with a convic- 
tion and a clearness which could come from the 



222 The Use of Prayer. 

Son of God alone ; He had shown and proved that 
love, by His own life, because, by reason of that 
love, the Father had sent the Son to be the Sav- 
iour of the world. Was it any wonder that Jesus, 
when He was about to leave His disciples, know- 
ing, that, in spite of all its value and power, prayer 
would be as hard for them, as likely to grow irk- 
some, as likely to degenerate into formalism, as it 
had been in the history of mankind before, said to 
them, for encouragement and power, ''Whatsoever 
ye shall ask the Father ijt my name, He will give 
it you " ? It was the greatest proof of Christ's 
appreciation and value of what He was to men. 
Put those words into the mouth of any other man, 
however pure and high his character, and imagine 
their sound of blasphemy. Such a result of open- 
ing up the way of approach to the throne of God 
belonofed alone to that life which had come from 
the presence of God, and told the unclouded mes- 
sage of His love. And it does the same to-day. 

May we not feel that the reality and warmth 
of our prayers will be precisely in proportion 
to our knowledge of the gift of God through 
Jesus Christ our Lord .^ The formalism of our 
Christianity will make our prayers formal. We 
shall rise from our knees, and go back to our 
life, and rely upon the world, and not upon God, 
yield our wills to the things about us, if there is 



The Use of Prayer. 223 

no appreciation in our hearts of Him who has 
come from heaven to be our Saviour. We shall 
hurry past our rehgious duties, to get to our day's 
work ; we shall consider their presence in the 
midst of life an intrusion, when we know nothing 
of Him who has come into the midst of our lives 
from heaven and from our Father. It will be 
hard to hold to that which has its reason in the 
oneness of God with us, and His nearness to the 
world, when every thing about us speaks against 
such facts, and we have no share in the one great 
personal revelation which speaks of them and for 
them. And the despairing cry of many a man, 
** I know I ought to pray," would be best answered 
by his changing it into these words : " I know I 
ought to be the servant and disciple of Christ." 
And where can there be such a thing as an un- 
answered prayer, when we have the knowledge 
and example of Him whose whole life found its 
power in submission to the Father ; who prayed, 
and never doubted that out of all His suffer- 
ing His Father would bring the victory to Him 1 
There is a higher side to every event of life : 
we find that in Christ ; and then we have a whole 
range of answers waiting for our prayers, which 
God will give us, when our heart in its ignorance 
knows not what to ask, and simply in faith pours 
all its wants into its Father's ear. 



224 The Use of Prayer, 

Prayer, then, as the greatest gift to life, like all 
other gifts is a responsibility. We cannot take 
it up, and use it thoughtlessly, carelessly, and 
occasionally. If we do that, it will be taken from 
us as unworthy possessors. But as a possession 
of the immortal soul, given by God, and helped 
by Christ, if used faithfully, earnestly, and con- 
stantly, it will grow in value, and be the greatest 
treasure of our earthly lives. How have we used 
it in the past 1 Has it gradually slipped away 
from us, as we have failed to appreciate its great- 
ness and its blessedness .-* If so, as children once 
more we need to gather around the Father's foot- 
stool, and to renew all the hope and strength of 
this life, which He has given us, by the act which 
tells at once of His love to us and of our devotion 
to Him. 



XVI. 
MUSIC AND RELIGION. 

"And four thotisand Levites praised the Lord with the instrU' 
ments which I made y said David, to praise therewith" — i Chron- 
icles xxiii. 5. 

KING DAVID knew that his death was ap- 
proaching ; and, as he makes provision for the 
future conduct of that temple which it was com- 
mitted to his son Solomon to build, we are not 
surprised, from what we know of the king's per- 
sonal genius, that the musical service receives 
liberal attention. He allots four thousand, more 
than one-tenth of all the Levites of adult age, 
to the temple choir ; he gathers together all the 
instruments which he had invented in his long 
and enthusiastic musical experience, and bequeaths 
them for future use to the young nation. And 
so, bound up with the fervor of devotion, the 
prophetic insight, the typical prominence, and 
the religious aspiration of the great king of 
Israel, whose throne was to be the seat of the 
incarnate Son of God, is the musical growth and 
feeling of men, which has never ceased from that 

225 



226 Music and Religion, 



day to this. We may therefore with profit 
endeavor to find some of the relations between 
religion and music, as they are united either in 
our Church-service or our daily life. 

" To praise therewith," that is the object of that 
musical appointment of the Psalmist king ; and 
it expresses well the attitude of the Bible towards 
music. Musical expression is represented to us 
as a human activity, originating with Jubal, one 
of the descendants, not of Seth, but of the out- 
cast Cain. But, like all such human endowments 
in the Bible, it is found gravitating back to God, 
the centre of human power, and so sharing in the 
fruits of that work of redemption whose progress 
it is the object of the Bible to depict. Miriam 
at the Red Sea, Deborah after the victory over 
Sisera, Jephthah's daughter advancing to celebrate 
her father's triumph, the women of Israel singing 
of the exploits of the young hero David, David 
himself before the ark, the temple-service with 
its full appointment, the brilliant Solomon the 
author of a thousand and five songs, the songs of 
degrees by which the people went up to the 
worship of the new temple, the Passover hymn 
before the passion, the growing psalmody of the 
young Christian Church's " hymns and spiritual 
songs," the golden harps and new song of the 
heavenly Jerusalem, — these tell the course of 



Music and Religion. 227 

the redemption of music, keeping pace with the 
growing revelation of God. 

In the Bible, there is no theory of musical effect 
and power, there is no fundamental treatment of 
the nature of music as related to all life, such as 
we can read in Plato's " Republic ; " but there 
is the determination, which we should expect in 
the Bible from its nature everywhere else, to give 
to music a subject which shall redeem it by being 
worthy of it. At the period of the decline of 
Greek life, which had made so much of the 
philosophic side of music, Plutarch wrote, '* The 
chiefest and sublimest end of music is the grace- 
ful return of our thanks to the gods," In those 
words the wisdom of the Bible representation is 
vindicated ; and it is seen, from an entirely extra- 
biblical experience, that a worthy conception of 
God is the only thing which can give the true 
inspiration of music, and keep it pure and noble 
through all its strains. Here is a reason why 
music and religion should never be divorced ; why 
the musical expression of the Church has a claim 
to share in every new musical advancement, and 
must not forever cling to old forms : it is for the 
sake of music as well as of religion. Men must 
have a God to praise, and must praise Him with 
the best instrument they have. God is necessary 
for our amusements, and for our recreations, or 



228 Music and Religion. 



they will sink down and down, drawing -with them 
every noblest faculty and every highest endow- 
ment. Why need men and women who have the 
greatest advantages for knowing God, allow those 
very advantages to turn away their hearts from 
Him ? What Plutarch wrote, again has an almost 
startling significance to-day, as it shows how dan- 
gers are reproduced in the world's experience : 
**Our men of art, contemning its ancient majesty, 
instead of that manly, grave, heaven-born music, 
so acceptable to the gods, have brought into the 
theatres a sort of effeminate musical tattling, — 
mere sound without substance." A God near to 
us, a God inspiring every action, raising the whole 
tone of life, is the only thing which can save our 
art from sinking to the depths which excited the 
alarm and warning of a heathen philosopher. 

And then look at some of the features of the 
revelation of God which the Bible gives us, and 
see how they agree with the best features of 
musical life and growth. The Bible reveals God 
to man, and man to himself ; it opens depths of 
meaning which ordinary life cannot sound ; it 
calls man the son of God ; it bases itself upon 
the love of God, which passeth knowledge ; it 
speaks of things which eye hath not seen, nor 
ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of 
man to conceive. All such statements, which are 



Music and Religion. 229 

very common in the Bible, combine to make up 
a very bold position ; it is one over which human 
knowledge and scientific definition are always 
stumbling, and yet it is one for which the simplest 
souls are, time and time again, able to thank 
God out of the experience of some consoled and 
strengthened life. 

If we allow music any rights of its own, how- 
ever little any one of us may pretend to under- 
stand its mysteries, they must be based upon its 
claim to give expression which is beyond the 
power of words, and to utter conceptions which 
thought cannot formulate. The constant attempt 
to heighten the effect of words by uniting music 
to them ; the existence of musical compositions 
which are not chained to words, and which it 
would be folly for words to attempt to interpret ; 
the undoubted effect of music upon individuals 
or upon masses of men, — those are simple facts 
which tell of the value of music to men, in its 
power to take them out of the surroundings even 
of the deepest thoughts, to lift their aspirations 
where nothing else can go, to carry them into the 
presence of a power of harmony and order more 
fundamental than the skill of the hand or the 
logic of the mind can represent. Is there such a 
sphere of life .'' Business and material life disre- 
gard it ; science, with its knowledge of facts, says 



230 Mitsic and Religion, 

that it can tell nothing about it ; religious faith 
alone answers joyfully and surely, " Yes. What 
we see is but the least part of what there is ; our 
thoughts are but broken lights of God, and of His 
deep existence, out of which we came." In such 
a faith music finds its character and its sure foun- 
dation. It may soar into the highest stretches, 
out of the reach of man's thought, and it is still 
kept by the power of God. 

And here is to be seen the significance of one 
of the most striking facts of history. In our time, 
when science, the knowledge of the seen, has 
been reigning supreme in the minds of men, music 
has become such an art as it never was before. 
A time that deals with the materials of the earth, 
in architecture still has to stand despairingly, 
though rejoicingly, before the Parthenon and 
Cologne Cathedral, in sculpture before the Venus 
of Milo, in painting before the Sistine Madonna. 
It seems as if our knowledge of material had 
taken from us the power to get at its spirit and its 
capabilities, and to deal with it in the spiritual 
power which has at times belonged to generations 
before us. But in music the soul of man, uncon- 
querable, has found the outlet which was denied it 
by the spirit of the times elsewhere. Its greatest 
triumphs have been within the last hundred years. 
It has been the voice of God speaking, to these 



Music and Religion. 231 

times of material prosperity and of scientific 
thought, of something that is beyond. It has 
stirred the deathless soul. And, as that soul 
looks upward, where shall it find its satisfaction 
but in its God ; as it asks for a word from beyond 
the realm of human discovery and thought, why 
should it not claim, as the very answer to all its 
longings, the perfect revelation of Jesus Christ } 
I care not how little or how much we may know 
of the technique of music, we all have a right to 
claim the spirit of music ; and without that the 
deepest technical knowledge may make the man a 
mere instrument, giving to others what he does 
not get himself : and that spirit is the knowledge 
and love of a God above and beyond us. 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell ; 
That mind and soul, according well, 

May make one music, as before. 

Then there is the universality of religion. It 
is meant for all men : there are all grades and 
kinds of reception of it. The Gospel of Christ 
is for all : it speaks to children and to old men ; it 
has truths for the simple, and doctrines for the 
wise ; it meets all nations of men, each according 
to its nature and its needs. There are misun- 
derstandings and divisions among its followers, 



-232 Music and Religion. 

■but not in the religion itself. In that it has true 
^fellowship with an art which has a gift for all men, 
-which speaks very differently and in varying 
.tones, but, in one way or another, affects the sim- 
plest and the most cultured, appeals to the joyful 
.and to the sorrowing, defies lines of nationality 
,and of language-, and is appropriated by all ac- 
cording to the needs of each. Airs which musi- 
.cal pedants despise, touch the hearts of men, and 
influence their lives ; and, on the other hand, com- 
;positions which seem confused sound to the igno- 
rant, are a source of deepest inspiration to the 
.cultivated and appreciative ear. It is an art in 
•which, above all others, there is no true place for 
intolerance, just as in religion there ought to be 
the deepest appreciation, as nowhere else, of the 
idghts and feelings of others. 

Jn times when men are strangely jostled to- 
'gether, when no one can entirely separate himself 
from the companionship of those very different 
from himself, when the Church has a mission to 
all classes and conditions of men, it cannot afford 
to disregard this great art of equally broad affini- 
ties. It cannot afford to use it only in one way, 
or to minister to only a few classes of minds by 
it. It wants all its resources, from the simplest 
and solidest to the most complicated and delicate. 
It wants its aid, that in its services the Church 



Music and Religion. 233 

may, while keeping true to its Divine character, 
reflect that comprehensiveness which must belong 
to a rehgion of Divine love. 

The object of religion is harmony: for that it 
labors, — harmony between heaven and earth, be- 
tween man and man, harmony in the life of the 
individual, with its varying experiences. It is a 
difficult task, one of which men despair, one 
which only the Divine hand can produce on this 
strangely complicated instrument of the universe. 
The power of man to appreciate harmony finds 
a response in the growing resources of the musi- 
cal art ; and the yearnings of man for a better 
existence, where life shall not clash with death, 
joy with sorrow, and love with hate, finds an an- 
swer in a revelation which destroys death, com- 
forts sorrow, and makes love seen everywhere. 
There could be no better expression for heaven, 
as the place where such a revelation finds its com- 
pletion, than as the place of music. The har- 
mony of music, answering the wants of man, is 
drawn from seemingly hopeless materials, which 
are silent and sometimes even discordant, until 
genius forms them and inspires them. And in 
like manner it is out of the sin and suffering of 
the world, and out of the afflicted life of an incar- 
nate Saviour, that God's great work of harmony 
came. Does not every analogy teach us a deeper 



234 Music and Religion. 

faith, teach us to believe that the great Master 
will not leave this a place of discord ? that, hidden 
as the harmony may be, His hand cannot have 
failed to produce it? There is forgiveness for sin, 
there is atonement for sinners, there is life from 
death, there is the personal power of an everlast- 
ing God and Saviour, speaking harmony and com- 
fort to the souls of men. He who knows not that, 
is false, not only to the teachings of religion, but, 
as religion herself would say, also to the teachings 
of God's great gift of music. Religion furnishes 
that in which music ought to make us ready to 
believe : the one makes plain that after which the 
other is blindly feeling, and they unite their forces 
together to tell the story of a protecting and sav- 
ing and loving God. He is the great Musician, 
whose harmonious interpretation of all life's mys- 
teries we need to hear in Jesus Christ. 

Experience, like a pale musician, holds 

A dulcimer of patience in his hand, 

Whence harmonies we cannot understand, 

Of God's will in His worlds, the strain unfolds 

In sad, perplexed minors. 

We murmur, " Where is any certain tune 

Of measured music in such notes as these ?" 

But angels, leaning from the golden seat, 

Are not so minded : their fine ear hath won 

The issue of completed cadences ; 

And, smiling down the stars, they whisper, " Sweet." 



Music and Religion. 235 

There is a great deal of cheap jesting and 
small criticism expended upon Church music. Of 
course, it will be a hard question to deal with, — 
harder than any other, harder to-day than ever 
before, — because it is the attempt to deal with 
one of the points at which our ordinary life 
comes in contact with our Church life ; it is one 
of which the conditions are constantly changing, 
and one in which a large number of different 
tastes, presumably united in rehgious desire, but 
as presumably differing in circumstances of exter- 
nal position, all have to be considered. Ques- 
tions of detail and method in such a matter are 
very difficult. But for the true appreciation of 
the privilege and duty of the musical portion of 
religious service, it is necessary for us to know 
that conscientiousness in the ordinary culture of 
our life, charity and consideration for all, and a 
deep feeling of faith and thankfulness toward God, 
are conditions for true worship in the house of 
God. Sensational music will receive its severest 
blow when, by their private lives, Church-mem- 
bers are more careful of the training of them- 
selves and of their children ; there will be less 
fault-finding and petty criticism when we recog- 
nize the fact, that a religion for all men may take 
many forms of expression, and use many vehicles 
of feeling ; there will be the true spirit of worship 



236 Music and Religion. 

when we all appreciate, that, in the worship and 
service of God and of Christ, we are near to the 
fact which contains all the power of life within 
it, which surpasses all other things which ever 
enter the circle of our experience, and that there- 
fore, to voice our feelings, the noblest and best 
strains of the divinest art are not to be ad- 
mired for themselves, but are only the humble 
contribution of thankful men on the altar of a 
Master, who by His harmony puts them all to 
shame. 

May God give us the true gift of music, by 
opening our ears to hear His word, by loosening 
our tongues to tell forth His praise, by inspiring 
our hearts with the knowledge of our sonship of 
the Father ! and so we shall be of that choir who, 
in the land where there is to be no temple, shall 
make the harmony of the world to come. We 
are training ourselves, and we are being trained, 
for that. Hard, adverse conditions have no right 
to discourage us. The new song is to be the 
one sung by those who have come out of great 
tribulation. He who, amid all the discords and 
calamities of human life, has kept the sense and 
power of music alive in the world. He has been 
made known to us; and all the strains of life's 
psalm reflect our love and devotion to Him. 
We are being educated for the eternal music of 



Music and Religion. 237 

heaven. Its elements are with us now in the 
knowledge of Christ Jesus ; to them may we be 
faithful, and so do our part rightly, both here and 
hereafter ! 



XVII. 

PERSONAL RELIGION AND MISSION- 
ARY EFFORT. 

" And being brought on their way by the church, they passed 
through Phenice and Samaria^ declaring the conversion of the Gen- 
tiles : and they caused great joy unto all the brethren,^'' — ACTS xv. 3. 

A WORD and its peculiar use are often the 
best landmark of the progress of a great 
movement. Just at some peculiar crisis it has 
received an extension of its meaning or its applica- 
tion ; and ever after, wherever that word goes, in 
its new character it carries the story of that event. 
As the new meaning of the word mingles with 
the old ones, it tells that a new or larger idea has 
found its way into all the relations which that word 
formerly covered; and the old and the new help 
to interpret each other. Such a process going on 
as to the word ** conversion," we find in our text. 
It was just beginning to be applied to what we 
call missionary effort ; it was just receiving that 
application with which we are so familiar in such 
a phrase as ''the conversion of the world." Hith- 
2.38 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 2$g 

erto it had been a word signifying the turning 
of the people of Israel back to that which had 
been revealed as the very centre of their national 
life, — the power and knowledge of Jehovah. In 
that sense it had been used by the prophet Isaiah 
in that passage about hardening the hearts of the 
people, which is quoted by three of the evangel- 
ists among the utterances by Christ, and which 
has given so great currency and familiarity to the 
word ** converted." Jesus had applied the word 
still farther in that saying of His, " Except ye be 
converted, and become as little children, ye shall 
not enter into the kingdom of heaven." That was 
carrying it to the personal life of each Israelite. 

But here the word leaps at once to its largest 
extension, that which Isaiah had foreseen as the 
strangest, most distant, most convincing fact of 
God's power, — the conversion, the turning to Is- 
rael's God as if He were their own, of the isles of 
the Gentiles. It was a step of doctrinal progress 
which throws into the shade every disputed point 
over which the Church has been troubled since 
then. Of course, as they passed through Phenice 
and Samaria with such a message of the con- 
version of the Gentiles, Paul and Barnabas would 
be received with joy. The hope and expectation 
of some such announcement had in a vague way 
been the strength of all that was good in those 



240 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 

despised countries for many years. And it was 
equally natural that the Jews, who felt that they 
were the people who had the only hope from God, 
could not understand the conversion of the Gen- 
tiles. To what could they turn again, who had 
never been endowed with the great central power 
of all life } We can imagine the outcry that arose 
at such a misuse of the word : how warnings were 
uttered as to the result of this dangerous exten- 
sion of Scripture terms ; how it was conclusively 
proved, that, to apply this word in this way, involved 
the terrible consequence of admitting, as in some 
way connected with the power and gift of God, all 
the unsanctified endowments and forces which had 
prevailed in the previous life of those Gentile na- 
tions. We can imagine all that, for it has been 
heard a great many times since that day. We are 
only surprised that the weak infant Church stood 
such an ordeal, which, when repeated in much 
milder forms, has often shaken so seriously what 
has seemed like very strong organizations. We 
feel sure that the Church did sustain such a test 
only because there was Divine power within it, 
because the Master's hand held it, and because 
the forward step which it was taking was founded 
upon the eternal truth of God, which it was its 
duty to reveal. 

That forward step was taken in connection with 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 241 

Christian missions. The new principle was the 
missionary principle ; the truth which made men 
bold was that with which Christ has gone over 
the face of the earth, declaring that God is the 
Father of all men. Forever, then, missions are 
identified with the progressive thought of the 
Church and of the world ; they belong to the men 
whose aspirations are largest and whose thoughts 
are boldest. They, and they alone, bear witness 
to a change of thought, which opened a new mode 
of life and of mutual relation throughout the 
world. They, in their establishment and triumph, 
are a comfort and strength to all who have any 
battle to fight of the large idea against the small 
one, of the truth of God against the opinion of 
man, or of new movements against old methods. 
There is everlasting power in those words of 
Christ to every live and active man, " Let the 
dead bury their dead, but go thou and preach 
the kingdom of God." 

And, as the missionary spirit gave to this word 
" conversion " its largest extension and truest 
meaning, so it keeps that word free from a recur- 
rence of the narrowing process which had fastened 
upon it, and of which there is ever danger of a 
repetition. This is a very important matter : it 
opens the whole question of the relation between 
personal religion and missionary effort. The 



242 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 

word "conversion" is a recognized one in Chris- 
tian literature and conversation ; it is one which 
cannot be banished, even if there were a desire to 
do so ; it is a word which has expressed, and ever 
will express, the deepest personal experience which 
a man can pass through in all his life, whether it 
come gradually or suddenly. No other word has 
ever taken its place. And yet men are afraid of 
it ; it becomes unpopular in particular times and 
under particular circumstances. Cannot the larger 
meaning of the word help us in these personal 
aspects and their dangers, as we look at them more 
closely .-* Cannot the conversion of the world in- 
terpret and assist our own conversion "} Cannot 
our interest in the one be made to re-act upon our 
interest in the other } 

The personal aspect of conversion is frightful 
to many a man. He does not like to say that he 
is converted. It seems like an assertion of the 
power and care of self to an unwarranted degree. 
It speaks of separation in a way for which very 
few men are prepared. It speaks of turning, and 
it makes it appear to the man's mind as if he had 
turned, away from the rest of the world, to the 
little world within him, for salvation. He does not 
dare to say that he is converted, because he says 
that he has never felt that peculiar power which 
seems to warrant such an assertion. Conversion 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 243 

stands often in one's life for a particular line of 
changed conduct : and, good as it may be for him- 
self, he does not dare to proclaim it as a necessity 
for all ; or even good as it may be for others, 
he does not see the necessity of it for himself. 
Pressed by such feeling, our religious phraseology 
has let the good old word, which Christianity 
made so full of meaning, drop into obscurity. 
And yet, as we have said, no expression has been 
found to take its place, and we can hardly believe 
that any ever will be found. To turn to God is 
surely as comprehensive and rich an expression 
for true human experience as the heart of man 
can ever desire ; the Bible, which has given it 
to us, in that has given only another proof of its 
Divine inspiration. 

Does not the mission-work, as a part of the 
Christian life, bound up with it, and inseparable 
from it, save this word, which is so characteristic 
of it, from any such danger 1 Conversion, as it is 
enlarged and applied to all men, is recognized as 
the turning of each man toward the centre of his 
life as a man, toward that which belongs to him- 
self and to every other man that is in the world. 
He sees and respects its processes and modes for 
himself. The change and variety of those modes 
in others do not affect the truth, that the great 
action belongs to all alike. The man bends him- 



244 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 

self to what is needed to be done for his own sal- 
vation, he undertakes gladly the special work of 
. reform and labor of love toward his God that be- 
longs to him ; but the great word which author- 
izes all that effort is not exhausted in it. As he 
hears of the conversion of men everywhere, as 
that story is told to him, as it was by the returned 
apostles to the disciples of old, the warrant of all 
that he is doing for himself becomes stronger and 
clearer. It is like the happy experience which so 
often encourages us, as when, with all our personal 
energy and wisdom, we have labored at our little 
work, there comes to us the news of one who 
wanted just our labor to complete his effort, and 
the sense of our world-wide connection adds to the 
dignity of all our subsequent efforts. 

We never shall know how much the universal 
element in the mission-work of the Church has 
helped to interpret the personal message of salva- 
tion to the souls of men ; nor shall we know how 
much evil has been accomplished, through the ob- 
scuring of that element, in keeping some of the 
noblest and most unselfish characters from Chris- 
tian profession. The Church's missionary work 
boldly asserted, and not apologized for, must attract, 
rather than repel, men. It gives a reason for the 
Church's existence which must appeal to the best 
energies and thoughts of men. If the great uni- 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 24^ 

versa! idea of missions was more real to the heart 
of man, should we be quite so much afraid to 
speak of religion, the great cause of humanity, to 
each other ? When we speak of our hope that we 
have been converted, or pray for some other that 
he shall be converted, we mean nothing desirable 
or noble unless the missionary spirit has filled and 
enlarged all our conceptions of our relation to 
God and to our fellow-men. 

There is also an intellectual side to the difficul- 
ties about conversion. We are asked to admit a 
power from God to our lives ; to give it complete 
sway ; to let it override and obscure all other pow- 
ers within us ; to give up being every thing else, 
and to become religious men. And then comes 
the thought that there are other powers from God 
within us and around us. They may have been 
wrongly used, and may have done great harm ; but, 
after all, they are from Him, for "the earth is the 
Lord's, and the fulness thereof." In ourselves we 
feel the difficulty, for the very position in life in 
which God has placed us often seems to involve us 
in spiritual danger, and yet we cannot leave it. 
We are asked to unite ourselves to a Church which 
has the presence of God within it, and yet outside 
of the Church's action we see manifestations of 
God which attract us. Are they all to be branded 
as evil and unproductive } Is the new Christian 



246 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort, 

force a separative force, declaring that God's for- 
mer work is a failure, and therefore that a new 
one has to be introduced ? If that is so, how do 
we know that this new one is not to be a failure 
also ? Perhaps it is better not to be converted, 
and to stay and to try to work out our salvation 
with the old forces, — with the human activity and 
wisdom and uprightness of being, which so often 
show the marks of God's presence everywhere. 
Surely no one can blame us for that ; and, above 
all, God cannot. If this is a difficulty which we 
have felt ourselves or heard stated by others, we 
can understand that the demand is for an answer 
as to the relation of this new power of Christ to all 
the other forces of life. Missions and the mission- 
ary spirit give that answer. The word "conver- 
sion," in the large field of the word's progress, is 
seen to mean utilizing of powers, not their destruc- 
tion. Missionary work is the claiming of the 
acquired and inherited result of God's training 
everywhere for Him. The spirit of denial of mis- 
sions says that there are such results that never 
can be used for Him, never can be consecrated for 
His purpose. That spirit makes our Christianity 
and the results of God's training in other fields 
antagonistic to each other, when it declares that 
any nation cannot receive, or does not need, con- 
version. That was what the narrow Jewish idea 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 247 

of conversion said : let a man come under the in- 
fluence of the nation specially selected by God, 
and he can be converted ; otherwise he cannot be. 
But, as Paul and Barnabas declared the conversion 
of the Gentiles, they said, that, though a man had 
lived in a place where Greek and Roman litera- 
ture alone had been read, though he were de- 
scended from a line of ancestors who had never 
felt any other influences than those which make 
rich and glorious the pages of heathen antiquity, 
he has not gone beyond the reach of God's power. 
There was no chance for such a thing, for all 
power which deserved the name was from God. 
That step which our text records was the opening 
of the way for that Greek influence in Christian 
thought and literature, which, combining with the 
Hebrew elements, has made the religion of Christ 
one fitted alike for the immovable East and the 
progressive West. 

And it is the same with the missionary work 
to-day. It goes to nations fixed in one form 
through centuries of training, in the strongest 
faith that all that training has come from God ; it 
is sure that this Gospel, which took the Grecian 
culture, and made it useful for Him from whom 
all its power came, will also find out all that is 
good in every nation, and ingraft it upon the uni- 
versal religion as the rightful possession of its 



248 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 

great Master. Who knows what features in our 
great unchangeable faith are to be brought out by 
Eastern, Mongolian, and African thought ? We 
have not begun to exhaust its resources. To say 
that we had, would show that we did not believe 
it to be Divine. The barbarian hordes of the 
North, converted to Christianity, carried on the 
process of enlargement which Paul and Barnabas 
announced as they declared the conversion of the 
Grecian Gentiles. It is missionary effort which, 
entering into the nations hitherto unknown, has 
annexed their peculiar powers to the realms of hu- 
man achievements, opened their books and litera- 
tures to study, and revealed the strange workings 
of God in their history. It is missionary effort 
which is not afraid to face any development of 
human life and feeling, sure that it has some 
marks of God's power within it. 

Religion cannot be narrow while it is mis- 
sionary. It is always courting new influences, and 
raising new questions in their very best form, in 
their practical shape. To know how to deal with 
a form of thought which by right and inheritance 
possesses a whole nation, and influences all its 
action, will surely be more valuable than to man- 
ufacture the answer to some speculative doubt 
that a dreamer has concocted at home. When 
our best and most active minds among laymen 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 249 

and clergymen throw themselves into missionary 
labors and movements more earnestly, we shall 
all appreciate the infinite resources of our religion 
better. We shall feel that it calls us away from 
no true power of God : it seeks rather to find and 
use them all. It says that all men must be con- 
verted at home and abroad, and that a high stand- 
ard of moral or intellectual life enhances rather 
than diminishes the necessity of the action ; be- 
cause conversion is bringing back to the sway 
of God every good power, either of heart or mind, 
which He has implanted in his creature, man. 
Be missionary Christians, and we cannot help 
being bold and broad Christians in all our personal 
experiences. 

But difficulties as to conversion lie in a very 
different direction for the great multitude of men. 
They arise from the pressure of material interests. 
Men are asked, in conversion, to turn from the 
earth to heaven, from man to God, and to believe 
and assert that spiritual things are the ones that 
make the most important and imperative demands ; 
and all the time, around them are material necessi- 
ties calling for attention, and bodily duties calling 
for action. The search after the mere support for 
daily life, the struggle to keep themselves abreast 
of a swiftly moving world, seem to demand all 
their energies. How can they be expected to deal 



250 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 

with spiritual things under such circumstances ? 
Before that can be done, it must be seen that 
there is some connection between all these mate- 
rial things and the power of God, so that due 
attention to one is not the annihilation of the 
other. Turning to God must be seen to be only 
a closer turning to the right use of the world, 
which God has given. 

The connection of God and the material world 
through nature does not come close enough to 
man's own mind and heart to be long remem- 
bered. Men work for bread, and they are forever 
forgetting that that bread never could have been 
theirs without God's sunshine; they dig for gold 
and silver, and will not think that those things 
lie ready for their use, only because God's laws 
stored them up ages ago. And so a man's prop- 
erty, and the food that he eats, is often more 
Divine than the man himself. He himself, his 
life and activity, form a great prison-house, into 
which things of God's making are carried, losing 
all their Divine significance by reason of his want 
of Divine knowledge ; and then the man himself 
says that these things, which he is keeping all 
the time from their Master, are preventing him 
from being God's servant. There can be no more 
effective way of breaking in on this vicious circle 
than by declaring that the gold and the silver, the 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 251 

materials of the earth, are the Lord's, and claiming 
them as such. As the missionary cause says to 
men, "Give us of your means, and we will make it 
into Christians," it forever declares to those men 
that it is not the world that keeps them from 
being Christians, but their own selfish desires. 
It breaks down the lie, that any thing which God 
has given is to take our responsibility from us. 

Men say that they are tired of the continual 
begging for missionary causes ; it is said to sound 
mercenary, and to seem to put the souls of men at 
a money value. But is it not a witness to a con- 
version of forces which may well teach all mod- 
ern research that there is something beyond the 
mere physical powers which they are studying with 
so much success.'* One material form succeeds 
another in their experiments. Here a material 
form, sanctified by a spiritual force, turns into the 
ripened character of a converted man ; and then it 
re-acts again : the converted man makes the earth 
richer, works with a wisdom and diligence which 
he did not have before, and sends back to the 
very land from which the gold for his conversion 
came, riches which far surpass any thing which was 
given to the treasury of the Lord. Interaction of 
material and spiritual forces, — that is something 
which Christian missions have ever taught, but 
which they are teaching to-day with more point 



252 Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 

and illustration than ever before, because of the 
closer connection of all parts of the world. It is 
a lesson which we need in all our life, that we 
may learn that there is no opposition between 
our daily action and our religious hope ; that they 
came from the same God, and work to the same 
end. How can we learn it better than by having 
a true and vital connection with this great work, 
which, on a larger scale than any of our individual 
lives, teaches us the unity of all God's action 
wherever His hand is to be found "^ What you 
give will teach you more of the power of what 
you have. What is given to convert the heathen 
or your sinning brother, will forever say that your 
substance, from which that little portion was 
broken off, must not stand in the way of the 
true home missions in your own heart, but must 
convert you by turning your life, more and more 
fully in thankfulness, to the God from whom it 
came. 

" Set at liberty imprisoned angels " was the 
command of King John, as he sent his messenger 
to spread throughout the country pieces of old 
English currency stamped with the figure of 
Michael and the dragon. Would not the spread 
of the true missionary spirit give a new meanmg 
to the phrase, as men learned that their substance, 
the material gifts of God, need not be demons of 



Personal Religion and Missionary Effort. 253 

destruction, as they are too often to those who 
possess them ? But, seen in the right light, they 
are angels of salvation to ourselves and to others ; 
imprisoned by lives of selfishness and low motive, 
but set free to fly on God's errands, as they were 
used for the conversion, and never the destruc- 
tion, of souls. All expenditure, all use of this 
earth, would be blessed by such an emancipation. 

The man who does not believe in Christian 
missions is an anachronism ; he is behind the 
times. He is living in a world which has learned 
the oneness of the race, and the value of unity 
and sympathy. He is a citizen of a country that 
sends a broadinvitation to the world, and believes 
that men of all different antecedents and races 
can be welded into one homogeneous mass, and 
then in his own heart he draws back, and makes 
the most important interest of his life one that 
belongs to himself alone ; he is living in a time 
full of philanthropic action, and then he makes his 
religion, from which the spirit of that action has 
been learned, as selfish and narrow as possible. 
To strive for, and to anticipate with joy, the con- 
version of the whole world, must be the function 
of every man who rejoices in the power which, 
through Christ, is given unto him of turning to 
God. 



XVIII. 

THE ADVENT MESSAGE. 

" Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel." — Amos iv. 12. 

THESE words contain the two elements of all 
Advent thoughts, — the promise of a coming, 
and the exhortation to prepare for that coming. 
That they were uttered many years before the 
birth of that great Advent character, John the 
Baptist, and that they are found in a different part 
of the Bible from that which usually furnishes us 
with Advent lessons, are facts which declare, 
what is too often overlooked, that the Advent 
spirit is a constant one in the Bible, and one which 
it would make constant in all life. The one great 
difference between Christianity and all other forms 
of life and thought is, that the former has an 
Advent to it, and that the latter have not. Christ 
taught men to look forward ; and wherever the 
spirit of Christ prevails on the pages of the Bible, 
in the law, the prophets, the Gospels, or the Epis- 
tles, there is that forward look toward a well- 
marked future. But in other life there is no such 
254 



The Advent Message. 255 

definite spirit of anticipation. In the early days 
of life, which are its purest, its brightest, and its 
best, such a spirit does, indeed, prevail ; the child's 
expectation and the youth's ambition are among 
the best treasures which life has to give us. But 
after them comes the process of settling down, 
satisfied, or necessarily limited, with what life has 
given us ; the future is made a matter of empty 
speculation or of wild dreaming. The plans of 
those who delight to consider themselves progres- 
sive men, are more often destructive than construc- 
tive, in marked contrast to the Bible, which, in all 
its parts, seems to know clearly what it desires to 
produce. Christ taught men that God was all 
about their lives ; wherever they might go, they 
were to meet Him ; they could not escape Him ; 
in Him they lived and moved and had their being. 
And, therefore, there was always a prospect of 
meeting Him ; all progress, either conscious or 
unconscious, voluntary or compulsory, could be de- 
fined as God and man meeting together. Chris- 
tianity rejoices in this idea, because one element 
of its conception of both God and man is, that they 
belong together ; man was made by God that they 
might be together. But no wonder, that, in all the 
ordinary forms of human life, the thought of this 
meeting is pushed aside, or postponed until a dis- 
tant and vague season, for it has no place in the 



256 The Advent Message. 

conception of life which belongs to most men. 
To them the life of men is happiest away from 
God ; only when life is done, and it is time for it 
to close, is it absorbed back into that great source 
from which it came. If an Advent season can help 
us to this better idea of our relation to God, and 
oppose that false one which all the world endeav- 
ors to give us, it will show its real meaning and 
value. To some of its lessons of preparation for 
meeting our God, we turn our attention. 

There is always a generation that is growing up, 
preparing for the world, as we say. The world 
has never been without such a class, — the young, 
the vigorous, the sanguine, — and it never will be ; 
and it is one whose position and character tell 
very plainly the nature of the world's ideal. What 
is this for which they are preparing .^ What do they 
themselves consider it to be ? and what do others, 
whose experience is greater, tell them it is } Per- 
sonal gain and pleasure will demand one kind of 
preparation, and it is that preparation alone which 
the ideal, that is held up, too often incites. Men- 
tal acuteness, wide knowledge, personal attrac- 
tions, worldly advantages, all in varying degrees 
go toward the making-up of such preparation ; and 
every facility for them is eagerly sought, and the 
field of their exercise anxiously anticipated. 

*' Prepare to meet thy God " presents a very dif- 



The Advent Message. 257 

ferent ideal. It supposes that the world of men 
and women, of events and circumstances, was> 
made and is controlled by God. He is in it ;, 
behind all its more evident aspects He exists as. 
a great power which is unlimited in its plans, and 
unmeasured in its force. Into such a world we are- 
all called to enter; and for preparation toward such 
a destiny are needed spiritual acquirements, — the- 
power of patience and self-denial, the accurate- 
perception of what is for, and what is against,, 
God's glory, the possession of firm principle and 
courageous faith to resist the wrong and to assist 
the good. How many men have failed, in the 
world for want of just those things ! The whole 
moral aspect of life was obscured to them ; they 
did not know that they were going to meet God,, 
with His stern demands and far-reaching plans. 
Their eyes were fixed only upon their brethren, — 
upon their ambitions and their desires, so similar 
to their own ; and into the contest concerning all 
such things they were ready to enter. And 
whether they have been successful, or not, in that 
direction, matters not ; they were not prepared to 
meet their God. The demands which a world 
ruled by Him placed upon them were too great. 
This conception of the world was too great for' 
the puny training which they had received. They 
succumbed to temptation ; they lost their faith. 



.•258 The Advent Message. 

The Advent message brings back the true ideal ; 
:ksay^, "Awake out of sleep. Put off the works of 
fdarkness ; put on the armor of light." Whether 
\we are just entering the world, or whether this Ad- 
•yent sjeason finds us in the midst of it, passing from 
•one experience to another, its message is, " Before 
;US is God." For destruction or for salvation, ac- 
, cording to our preparation, He is there. Could 
<we want a greater message, one more full of dig- 
'.nity and promise } Is it not worth hearing young 
imen and women, who are looking forward to many 
■years of activity and joy.^ Do not treat life as 
,an earthly and insignificant thing ; but at every 
iStep be sure that there is present the power of 
iGod, demanding our most complete preparation for 
^what it lays upon us. The preparation for such 
tdaily meetings with God is a wide one. It neglects 
imone of the ordinary preparations, in body, mind, 
fOY spirit, for every emergency requiring wisdom 
.-and power ; it adds to that, it crowns it all, with 
that preparation of spirit trained by intercourse 
with God Himself, in the closet, in the church, by 
prayer, and by meditation, that we may be able to 
recognize His coming, and to do His will. 

There is what is called the progress of the 
world. Looked at in itself, it is a strange and 
confused thing. It is like the progress of the 
ocean, — full of currents, tides, advancing and re- 



The Advent Message. 259 

treating waves. Ideas, like fashions, rise and fall, 
come and go ; inventions are alternately applauded 
and ridiculed ; the pendulum of opinion is ever 
swinging, now in one direction and again in 
another. Principles of action seem at first un- 
limited in their beneficence, and then are evident 
as needing all the restraint which can be given 
them. Is there a great point, toward which all 
these changes are carrying the world "^ We see a 
progress, but toward what does it point } The 
world says that it does not know ; it believes in 
going forward, but cannot say where the end is to 
be. The revelation of Christ says that this move- 
ment is toward the complete revelation of God's 
will, until at length the world has met its God. 
And for that great meeting, all the progress of 
the world is to be a preparation : such a principle 
as that must affect all action ; it will make it im- 
possible to believe that the project or ideal of 
any one particular time contains all the truth, or 
is worthy of the unlimited homage, of a world that 
is expecting to meet its God. There would be a 
readiness to look in every direction for the ele- 
ments of that kingdom, which, if it is to come, 
must be as great as God Himself ; all nations, all 
ages, would be found to have something to contrib- 
ute to its power and welfare; no' knowledge in 
any direction would be despised ; there could be 



26o The /idvent Message. 

no discouragement at seeming failures, at unfor- 
tunate experiments, at temporary reverses, for 
often they would be found to contribute most 
largely to final success. There would be a greater 
desire to submit all plans to the revision and puri- 
fication of God's Spirit, and to be taught of Him 
in all that concerns the great future that is to be. 
Material progress would always be made subordi- 
nate to spiritual growth. 

That is the result of believing in the coming of 
the Lord. It is as far as possible from the dog- 
matic utterances and strained interpretations of 
what we have been apt to identify with all antici- 
pation of the coming of the Lord. It is some- 
thing which calls for preparation, and not for defi- 
nition. That picture of a judgment-day, when 
the books shall be opened, and the world shall 
recognize its consummation, is a necessity of 
human thought. Its details of description may 
have been so closely identified with that picture 
of the destruction of Jerusalem, and with the fea- 
tures of a time of disorder in the world, that we 
may be able to find little in them to appeal to our 
modes of thought and action ; but the idea be- 
comes more valuable and necessary every day, as, 
in the increasing clearness of historical light, the 
rise and fall" of nations become evident, as no 
great plan is seen to exist without a purpose, and 



The Advent Message. 261 



as an end and consummation are understood to 
belong to all wise action. '' Prepare to meet thy 
God " is a command which, when we have once 
heard it clearly in Christian revelation, can be 
heard re-echoed from all the surrounding points 
of human life. It is a voice which comes from 
heaven ; but earth takes it up, and prolongs it, 
and repeats it. And, instead of alarming us, this 
word, if rightly understood, if the God of whom it 
speaks is seen to be our Father, ought to make us 
more confident and active and faithful in every 
hope for the future. 

There is one more aspect of these words, and 
perhaps it is the one in which they have gained 
their greatest familiarity, — that in which they re- 
late to death. As soon as a man is born into this 
world, he begins to act as if this were his home, 
and as if he had left God forever. In the most 
common-sense way he begins to accustom himself 
to his surroundings. His body grows ; his sur- 
roundings claim his attention ; he learns the ways 
of this his new home, and gives himself to it more 
and more. If successful in life, as years go on 
ho. lays hold upon all that is attractive ; if unsuc- 
cessful, he gradually becomes identified with the 
more repulsive sides of earthly existence, till at 
length his appearance suggests any thing but 
spiritual belongings. At any time in such careers 



262 The Advent Message. 



one who knew nothing of the nature of man's exist- 
ence would suppose that man and the earth were 
becoming so associated that it would be impossi- 
ble to separate them. And yet all the time the 
man is marching toward a destiny outside of the 
body ; it is really God toward whom he is going. 
When the proper moment comes, the body shows 
that it has no affection for that soul : it lets it go, 
and returns to its sister-earth ; and the spirit re- 
turns to God, who gave it. At that moment the 
real tendency of life shows itself ; its real belong- 
ings are manifested. The word comes, " Arise 
and depart hence, for this is not your home." 

When the religion of the Bible brings that 
moment into prominence, it is often thought that 
it is a special foe to the happiness of life ; when a 
Christian declares that the life in the body is not 
the first thing in his estimation, but the eternal 
life of the soul is, he is generally supposed to be 
saying something extremely unnatural, if not dis- 
agreeable. But it is only a fact of all experience, 
of all ages, that is thus expressed. Religion did 
not make the grave : it only found it, and declared 
how it could be received ; it only pointed out to 
men, that, much as they might cling to the things 
of this earth, they could not continue to do so for- 
ever, because the things of this earth refused the 
association. And so, sooner or later, for all, the 



The Advent Message. 263 

cry is heard, "Behold, the bridegroom cometh : go 
ye forth to meet Him." It is a cry which wise 
and foolish virgins hear alike ; it is a cry which 
is heard in nature, even where it is not heard in 
the Gospel. Something besides earth claims us ; 
we must go forth to meet it. It is the Gospel 
which says, " Prepare to meet thy God." Let 
that day not come upon you unawares, as a thief 
in the night ; refuse to be snared by and identified 
with that bodily life, which must fail you ; live by 
the power of Him who came from heaven, and 
took flesh upon Him, only that by that life in the 
flesh He might do the will of His Father, and call 
men back to Him. 

Such a word as that draws inspiration out of a 
clear-sighted acknowledgment of that dark fact of 
death, to which most men are obliged to shut their 
eyes, for fear it should unnerve and weaken them. 
It looks upon it, not only with calm resignation, 
but with a spirit of earnest and active preparation 
for a great fact, which produces new power at every 
step. Yes, there is sternness to these words ; 
there was when Amos first uttered them to the 
wicked and debased kingdom of Israel. But when 
their sternness is heeded, when they move to a 
true appreciation of our relation to God, then, like 
God's storms everywhere, they purify our skies, 
they soften and enrich the soil of our lives, they 



264 The Advent Message. 

are the forerunners of rich fruits and fragrant 
flowers. 

And now that we have seen, in so many ways, 
the nature of Christ's Advent message, and its re- 
lation to our life on every side, we can appreciate 
how full in its meaning, how large in its influence, 
was that great first coming. God has come to the 
world in the life and work of Jesus Christ. Once 
the aspirations of prophetic men, the lives of saints 
and heroes, found their fulfilment in His appear- 
ing ; the lines of historical development, running 
through many strange experiences, converged in 
His life. The model of a life living in the world 
but belonging to the Father, was perfect in His 
incarnation ; the dark facts of poverty, suffering, 
death, and the grave were by Him made the means 
of a glorious redemption. All that is a promise 
of what can be, a pledge of what shall be. The 
Advent hope is no dream : it is a reality. In that 
assurance we are to live. Go out to meet this 
great Bridegroom, greet Him with confidence, fol- 
low Him with joy, and you are on Advent paths. 
If we all did that, what a Christian year it would 
be ! what a step of progress it would be toward 
the great Advent ! what an era it would miark 
in the history of our lives, of the community, yes, 
of the world ! Sin would be rebuked, the world 
would be told to be less clamorous in its demands, 



The Advent Message. 265 

and God would be everywhere exalted ; churches 
would be filled, because men would be anxious to 
go wherever they thought they could find God ; 
homes would be purified, that they might be fit 
places for His dwelling. Everywhere the note of 
preparation would be heard, telling of joyful activ- 
ity in anticipation of the great day of the Lord. 
As those around us were called to meet Him on 
the other side of the stream, we who remained 
would press forward only the more joyfully and 
confidently to that great consummation, when the 
Lord shall indeed come, with all His saints. That 
is the life which will break upon us, when in our 
hearts we all shall hear and obey that truest word 
of all human existence, *' Prepare to meet thy 
God." 



XIX. 

A CHRISTMAS SERMON. 

" And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us^'' — John 
i. 14. 

CHRISTMAS is a popular day, one which all 
people appreciate, no matter how slight their 
religious thought, or superficial their religious 
knowledge. But that fact makes it no less need- 
ful that we should be assured of the greatness and 
strength of the foundation on which the day rests. 
With more, and not less, gratitude and wonder we 
receive and use the light of the sun, now that we 
know how great is the distance from which it 
comes, how important, as the centre of the uni- 
verse, is the body which sends it to us, and how 
deep is the astronomical knowledge which is drawn 
from its study. The brightness in which we re- 
joice every day is no mere passing or fitful light : 
it is one whose destruction can only come as we 
at the same time perish. And so with joy and 
gratitude we read these words of the Christmas 
message ; they add to the brightness of the day, 
and do not diminish it by the depths of mysterious 
266 



A Christmas Sermon. 267 

knowledge which they open. We do not pretend 
that we can understand all which they express ; 
we, who cannot comprehend or explain all the 
depths of feeling which such a day as Christmas 
opens in the human heart, cannot answer all the 
questions of our minds as they contemplate God's 
action, which results in the establishment of such 
a universal day. But the words recording the ac- 
tion speak to our hearts of the permanence and 
greatness of the day. They tell us that it has 
foundations beyond any thing that we can see ; 
that behind its celebration is all the power of 
God ; that it will last as long as He is what He is ; 
and that only the destruction of God, which must 
also involve the destruction of His child, man, can 
bring to an end the observance of such a day as 
this. God's action, God's very nature, are involved 
in it. Through all our enjoyment of its human 
delights runs the sustaining thought of its Divine 
aspects. And so we are encouraged to look more 
closely at the statement of the action of God 
which gave us Christmas, and to see its natural 
connection with some of the special points of its 
celebration. 

**The Word "i^diS made flesh." We are told that 
expression is so valuable a characteristic of God's 
being, that one of the very persons of the Godhead 
is called "the Word." We can hardly be sur- 



268 A Christmas Sermon. 

prised at this, for is there a gift that deserves to 
be called Divine more than that of expression ? 
and, therefore, can there be a characteristic more 
significant of the Divine nature ? It is by the 
power of expression quite as much as that of 
thought, that man rises above the animals, even 
as the animals excel the plants. The silence of 
the vegetable passes into the sounds of the animal ; 
it passes upward into the speech of man ; it leads 
us, as we look to our Father in heaven, to ask for 
"the Word of God." No gift like that of expres- 
sion makes a man valuable and powerful with 
his fellow-men. It is one which uses not the 
tongue only ; but the face, the hand, and the form 
are all influenced by it, and made its servants. 
The mute Miltons are inglorious, and lie in the 
country churchyard ; the great singer lives from 
generation to generation. The philosopher sneers 
and frets at the influence of the orator ; the com- 
mon man reads the words of wisdom, and says, " I 
knew that, if I had only had the power to say it." 
Men of great resources are lost to the world, be- 
cause they cannot bring out their treasures ; and 
we look with eager anticipation to another world, 
where the stores acquired here shall be made 
available by new powers and under new conditions. 
For men, in whose lives such facts exist, no God 
but one who had the power of expression would 



A Christmas Sermon. 269 

ever be suitable. God's wisdom, God's power, 
God's knowledge, would not answer. He is not 
the God of mankind until He is also the Word. 
That fact gives life and warmth to God's existence. 
It is like the touch of the match to the great pile 
of fuel, with its stored-up powers of light and heat. 
He is no longer a great mysterious one at a dis- 
tance, for He has that power which brings every 
thing near ; He has it in its perfection. Its mani- 
festation is not confined to the forms of men's 
words, any more than the sounds of the animal 
kingdom suit our purposes. We do not picture 
Him as an eloquent Mercury or as a thundering 
Jove, but we know and declare that He is the 
Word of God. 

God can speak, can express Himself, — that is 
the joyful fact of Christmas Day. Does it not 
find expression in the celebration of the day .'* 
The songs, expression of words and sounds ; the 
greens, expression of symbols ; the gifts, expres- 
sion of action ; the light on the faces of children ; 
the hurrying steps ; the cheerful sounds, — all of 
these give it its character : it is a great open day. 
The word ''merry" seems to tell of that charac- 
teristic of open, evident action ; we hear its sounds, 
and see its sights. To many it seems even a 
dangerous characteristic, as ministering to super- 
ficiality and frivolity. And I know not how we 



2/0 A Christmas Sermon. 

can save it from such dangers, except by remem- 
bering the deep source whence all expression 
comes, and feeling, under the merry glancing 
of the sun on the surface of our life to-day, 
the deep fact that God is the Word, and there- 
fore that we His children can tell all our feelings 
forth in many ways. He presents Himself to-day 
as a God who can and will speak to us at all 
times. He sanctifies the channels of expression, 
that through them He may flow to us, and we 
may reach each other. It is a fact that would 
spread the influence of Christmas through all the 
year. Shall the hand which helps to-day, injure 
to-morrow .? Shall the tongue that blesses to-day, 
curse to-morrow .? Shall the sympathy that warms 
to-day, be found a frozen reserve to-morrow } 
Whether our eyes see this day in a Divine or 
a human light, whether we are thinking of our 
relation to others or to God, the Divineness of 
the day's action calls for its continuance and 
influence through all our life. More words of 
sympathy, more acts of helpfulness, more realiza- 
tion of God's constant desire to be with us, — 
those are things most necessary for life ; and 
they come to us through Christmas' declaration 
of Christ, the Word of God. 

Expression shows its right to be a characteris- 
tic of Deity in nothing more than in its trans- 



A Christmas Sermon. 271 

forming' and utilizing power. It touches the most 
commonplace materials, and at once they are 
made new things. The artist transforms the 
clay, the architect piles together the stones, 
the orator draws in and exhales the air, and the 
inspiration of expression in each makes of those 
substances results which live long. We seem to 
understand the declaration that all things were 
made by the Word. We feel that that same desire 
and necessity of expression, working in connection 
with the wonderful attributes of Deity, could not 
result in any thing less than this wonderful uni- 
verse of ours, where, out of such unpromising 
materials, so much is made. 

And so, when we look for the highest work of 
that Word of God, we turn to that material which 
is capable at once of the highest exaltation and 
of the greatest degradation. It is this flesh of 
ours. There is where the Greeks, the people 
most sensitive to earthly beauty of all nations of 
the earth, found the greatest possibility of its 
existence. It was the human form which they 
exercised, studied, and depicted. And it is in 
the degraded and besotted specimens of humanity 
which we meet, that all which is repulsive and 
inharmonious seems most dreadfully exhibited. 
The flesh is the means of the noblest activities 
and of the most debasing vices. Beauty charms 



2/2 A Christmas Sermon. 

and beauty insnares. The feeling of health is 
the most exhilarating and sustaining : it is the 
disease of the flesh that breaks the spirit, and 
weakens action. The advent of the soul of the 
child to the fleshly tabernacle is the era of re- 
joicing : the departure from the flesh is dreaded 
and avoided. Who shall rightly utilize this flesh, 
so contradictory and yet so noble a medium 1 
What does it matter if God express Himself in 
every way, — by nature, by thought, by feeling, — 
if this most important department never feels His 
presence } And so '' the Word is made flesh " is 
a sound full of hope and rejoicing. It declares 
the reality and actual working of God's expres- 
sion. He can take flesh ; He recognizes the pos- 
sibilities of this life of ours, and shows Himself 
in it. Henceforth let no man despair : there is 
not a low or degraded fact of life to which God 
cannot speak, and which will not be transformed 
by that word. That fleshly life which began on 
Christmas Day, not one of glory as the earth 
views it, not trying to gild and ornament the out- 
ward flesh, as so many of us do, but rather 
showing what a vehicle flesh can become, tells 
the story of a new creation. God can use every 
thing. Here is the bond between our two great 
Christian festivals. The work of Christmas, 
bringing Christ to flesh, is only carried on 



A Christinas Sermon. 273 

and perfected as that same Christ raises the 
decaying body to its position of a resurrection 
body. 

But to-day we rejoice that all our work has God 
in it. We see the great promise of the future 
for Christ and in us. Men do their little work on 
nature's domain, but they recognize that they 
do not begin to be the most important workers 
in that domain ; they know that behind all they 
do is the regularity of nature's laws, on which 
they absolutely depend, and in a more or less 
definite way they recognize God, and are obedient 
men. But, with regard to the affairs of human 
existence and of their own lives, it seems as if 
the weight rested on their own shoulders. And 
therefore, forgetting God, and giving themselves 
to it, they fall into sin. Pride, selfishness, indul- 
gence, — all enter as we forget that God can express 
Himself in lives of flesh. And here is the proof 
that He can do so. The Word made flesh tells 
us that wherever there is flesh, there should be 
the Word of God in its clearest, purest, highest 
state. God, who spoke through that flesh, is to 
speak through all flesh. That incarnate Son of 
God carries us back to the first charter of all 
human life, that it was made in the image of God, 
and we too in all our earthly lives are told that 
we can and must be the sons of God. And our 



2/4 ^ Christmas Sermon. 

celebration of this day and season, as in so many 
points it brings Divine and human, heavenly and 
earthly, things together, combining religious and 
social features, is not at fault ; much more, is not 
profane. It is carrying out the thought of the 
day's great fact. It is attempting to realize what 
all life ought to realize every day, — that humanity 
in all its earthly actions can be and ought to be 
the highest expression of the will of God. The 
day, by its pure and unselfish joy, rebukes our 
ordinary life, and sends us back to the incarnate 
Son of God to learn the means by which to do 
away with our sin, and live as we should in all 
the relations of this fleshly existence. 

But there are other modes of expression more 
intangible than the actions of the flesh. They 
are to be found in the associations of life. They 
are invisible to the ordinary observer, and can 
hardly be described by those who know them. 
We are pouring out our lives to those around us 
— in affection and influence and inspiration — in 
ways which they and we do not appreciate ; but, 
as we sum up our labors, often there comes to us 
the solemn fact, that certain lives are going their 
way of glory or disgrace because we placed them on 
that path. It is the most effective, it is the deep- 
est, mode of expression, — influence by personal 
contact with others. And we are not surprised, 



A Christmas Sermon. 275 

therefore, that a disciple who had stood so near 
Christ as St. John had, and had felt so strongly 
the influence of all that He said and did, should 
have put on a level with the taking of flesh, the 
life in that flesh. The story was not complete 
without that : '' He dwelt among us." The minis- 
try of that Word was in all the associations of 
childhood, youth, and manhood ; the expression 
of the Divine nature was not only in His being 
here in the flesh, but in His being what He was 
when He was here. 

We rejoice to-day over the Babe in the cradle, 
not only because He was born, but because we see 
the life then begun, stretching forward in all that 
we know was to come in its dwelling among men. 
Already we see the miracles, and hear the para- 
bles ; we know the facts of the wondrous life and 
death. He is to our eyes on the mount of the 
beatitudes and on the mount of Calvary, speaking 
on one, suffering on the other. Our rejoicings 
over the birth of the ordinary infant are based on 
what we know and hope of men's lives in general : 
our rejoicings over this life are from what we 
know of this life in itself, of all it did, and of all it 
does to-day. We see the dwelling with men, which 
began on that day, continuing not only over the 
extent of those thirty-three years, but, through 
the presence of the Spirit, lasting through all time. 



2/6 A Chrisimas Sermon. 

We seem to hear from those infant lips the words, 
*' Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of 
the world." We who have felt the dehght of such 
dwelling with us of human friends, we who know 
what it is to have our houses filled with those who 
bless us by their presence, can feel how deep is the 
joy of such a day. The universal Friend is pres- 
ent. The fact of the Divine Word is universal 
and eternal. We cannot recount its blessings. 
We may travel through all life, and place our fin- 
ger on all we have or enjoy, but that will not tell 
the story. We have Him, for consolation, for sup- 
port, for encouragement, for love. 

The invisible is more than the visible, the un- 
known greater than the known. In that sense 
Christmas Day is inexhaustible. Its blessings flow 
into our lives by day and by night ; we store up 
treasures from it, whose true value will not be 
known for long years to come. God's power of 
expression brings Him into association with men, 
and there is really no more to be said. He could 
not give more to us than Himself, and He could 
not get nearer to us without annihilating Himself 
and us. And yet we cannot imagine that that 
Divine power of expression, when once we are 
convinced of its existence, could stop short of that 
richest mode of action. It is no wonder that asso- 
ciation with each other takes this day as the one 



A Christmas Sermon. 277 

in which it is to show itself in its purest and best 
form, and that we try to tell each other that con- 
stantly, beneath all our material interests, which 
impose such peremptory demands upon our lives, 
there is that richest and best fact, that we are 
in each other's presence, that we are able to get at 
each other's lives, and know each other personally. 
For on the existence of that fact depends the proof 
of our being able to know our God as He should 
be known. The side of warm and loving interest 
in each other on this day can never cease. It of 
right belongs here, and it will show itself while 
the human heart knows its best tendencies. By 
all the power of association within us we are to 
desire, and through the fact of to-day's celebration 
we can secure, the dwelling of our Lord God. 

As, in his Revelation, John saw the armies of the 
living God enter into heaven, their battles all over, 
their conquests gained, at their head, on the white 
horse, was "the Word of God." He was their 
leader : in Him they had gained the victory. Is it 
not so.-* What can we do if God is not with us .-* 
What word is good if God's Word be not in it } 
How can we men carry through the great causes 
which rest upon us as children of our Father in 
heaven, unless that Father is as near as is this life 
of the flesh, is as much our support as is the asso- 
ciation of our brethren ? That God is Emmanuel, 



2/8 A Christmas Sermon. 

that the Son of God is the Word of God, is a 
cause of rejoicing which may well fill our hearts 
with deepest gladness and highest anticipations. 
Nothing can surpass it ; no day can be brighter 
than the one that brings it. Like the leader of 
an army, it marshals the other days of the year ; 
it gives them strength and encouragement now, it 
will give them victory hereafter. 



XX. 

CHRIST'S FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. 

"And when they were departed^ behold, the angel of the Lord 
appeareth to Joseph in a dream, sayhig. Arise, and take the 
yoiuig child and His mother, and flee into Egypt, and be than there 
until I bring thee word : for Herod will seek the young child to de- 
stroy Himy — Matthew ii. 13. 

THE flight into Egypt is not a portion of 
Christ's life that we mention frequently, or 
perhaps even think of very often. It comes as 
an uncomfortably dark incident just after the 
glories of Christmas and Epiphany, and it seems 
to us as if it were not necessary that the element 
of persecution in Christ's life should show itself 
so soon ; but we know that there must have been 
a purpose in it, for nothing in that wonderful life 
took place by accident. It must have been hard 
for Joseph to hear such a message just after the 
adoration of the shepherds and the visit of the 
magi had made him feel the greatness of the Child 
who was under his care and protection. But he 
had to obey the Lord, he had to go into Egypt ; 
and he arose and did it without murmuring. All 

279 



28o Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

the past glories only convinced him more fully 
that it was his duty to follow God's leading, and 
to go down into Egypt. 

Even the glories of the life of the Son of God 
could not shine without intermission on this earth. 
Vicissitude is not the fate of low or wicked things 
alone : it belongs to every thing. Christ took it 
as a portion of humanity's lot. *' Man being in 
honor abideth not : he is like the beasts that 
perish." That is true of man always; it belongs 
to him on his animal side, which triumphed when 
man sinned : and every earthly manifestation of 
honor may be expected to be transient, when even 
the innocent Son of God, with all the charms of 
infancy on Him, was allowed to remain unmo- 
lested for so short a time. 

But such a lesson of the weakness of humanity 
it was not necessary for Christ to teach us : that 
is written all about us only too plainly. Christ 
came for salvation : He came to show us how 
to find our way out of dark things, and not merely 
to make us know that they are dark ; He came to 
convict us of sin, but He came also to redeem us 
from sin. And so, if the flight into Egypt shows 
us the transitory character of glory, we may be 
sure that it also will teach us what is the true 
foundation of glory, and how it may really be pre- 
served amid all vicissitudes. 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 281 

• 
And we find, therefore, running all through this 

short story, as St. Matthew gives it to us, the fea- 
ture of God's special protection. The angel of the 
Lord informs Joseph of a danger of which he 
otherwise would not have known. He designates 
the place of flight. Joseph is to remain there until 
God calls him. And he finally returns at God's 
word, and, under His warning, turns aside and 
dwells in Nazareth. The whole event, in all its 
particulars, is pointed out to be the fulfilment of 
prophecy, and thus to be something which was 
connected with God's special knowledge. In this 
way the event brings before us the greatness of 
Christ in a very striking light. To the world He 
was nothing when the flight had taken place. Per- 
haps the shepherds felt ashamed of their story and 
of their vision when they heard that the Babe, of 
whom they had told so loudly, had fled by night. 
But that very flight had the power of God in it ; it 
was the result of God's loving care. It had in it 
all that had given any meaning to the angels' song 
or the wise men's gifts. They had value, as bear- 
ing witness to God's plans for that Babe. They 
signified that in Him God intended that peace 
should come upon the earth, and that distant 
kings and nations should be brought to the knowl- 
edge of the true God. But the humble procession 
into Egypt spoke equally of God's purposes and 



282 Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

care, of the fact that that Babe was His only- 
begotten Son ; and therefore it, too, was great to 
His eyes. 

Let that fact of being God's Son be the basis of 
all honor, and it abides ; it exists in a humble 
flight, in a sorrowful defeat, as well as in a glo- 
rious triumph ; in bereavement as well as in bless- 
ing. Boast not of achievements, of events, of 
passing actions ; but put your trust in character, 
in true relation to God, and then confidence con- 
tinues at all times. Rejoice in success and happi- 
ness, rejoice in a good deed done ; but do not trust 
in it or in its glory : that is very transient ; it 
goes no farther than itself. But rejoice in that 
from which it comes, in God's presence and care, 
and you have a flower that never shall fade. 

Christ went down into Egypt that the prophecy 
might be fulfilled, '' Out of Egypt have I called 
my son." And God always calls His sons out of 
Egypt, even if He seems to be almost cruel at first 
in sending them down there. Others go down 
there, .and never return : His sons, those who are 
His, come back. A mother looks at the innocence 
of her child ; it is as sweet as the song of the 
angels which had just come from heaven. Must 
that innocence fade 1 Must it go down into the 
world's Egypt, and be a fugitive, hiding itself from 
hostile powers that would kill it 1 Must that boy, 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 283. 

who now talks so plainly and simply of God, go 
out, and be exposed to the influences of impure 
and selfish men? She keeps the boy close to her; 
she dreads to let him go forth ; she wonders what 
the end of it can be. Or, some good thought is 
in our heart as we are brought near to the influ- 
ences of God's grace somewhere in life. How we 
long to keep it, as it visits us in some moment of 
God's nearness ! Must it flee into a wicked and 
godless Egypt of worldly life, and be lost.^ Surely 
there is a way to ?.void any such danger. " Out 
of Egypt have I called my son." If that childish 
innocence, if that good thought, are merely pleas- 
ing as incidents, as attainments, well may we look 
for them to be transitory. If we would preserve 
them, we must make that child feel its nearness 
to God as His child ; we must make that good 
thought or desire part of a life which feels its 
duty to Him as Christ's servant. We must give 
to them the true foundation, which shall continue. 
Then let them go. God sends them into Egypt, 
God will bring them out again. How many souls 
have lost their purity of childhood because they 
did not see that it was only valuable as it was a 
pledge of God's care and love, and did not, before 
it vanished, become servants of Christ, who came 
to make us sons of God ! How many good 
thoughts have come to nothing because they had 



.-284 Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

;no root in themselves, because we did not see the 
^necessity of giving them a real living power by 
.our being made sons of God ! Into Egypt we 
;all must go ; we cannot live among angels' songs 
;and Epiphany glories forever. Sin and tempta- 
:tion, sorrow and darkness, soon succeed happiness 
.and goodness. Christ asks us to go, as He did, as 
:Sons of God, to go in obedience and submission 
■to Him who loves us and watches over us. 

There is great interest and significance in the 

fact that Jesus Christ fled into Egypt. Egypt 

•was always closely connected with the people of 

Israel. All through the Old Testament it fills a 

:Sort of counterplace to Israel in God's dealings. 

First, there was the connection of Abraham and 

Joseph and Jacob with Pharaoh, then there was 

vthe captivity in Egypt, and the subsequent flight 

■thence under Moses. Solomon married an Egyp- 

ttian wife when the relations of Israel with foreign 

nations were beginning to grow more intimate. 

In the later days of the kingdom, in the lifetime of 

the great prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, 

the people were inclined to defend themselves by 

trusting to Egypt's help rather than by relying on 

God. After the return from the captivity, when 

Alexander founded Alexandria, there was a large 

colony of Jews in the new city, and a school of 

Jewish philosophers grew up there. It was there 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 285 

that the Old Testament was first translated into 
Greek, and connection between Egypt and Pales- 
tine was ever after actively maintained. It was 
to that Hebrew colony in Egypt, probably, that 
Christ was taken. He was safe there, because no 
one cared about Him. They were not on the 
lookout for the Messiah ; they were busy with 
their philosophies or their traffic : and no vision 
of angels appeared to them, no wise men would 
come there to find the fulfilment of a prophecy. 
The jealousy of Herod or of the Pharisees would 
never think of going to Alexandria to search for 
the infant Saviour, and they could trust the atmos- 
phere of that place to stifle the breath of any such 
life, without help from them ; and the people of 
that city could not trouble about a man and his 
wife and little child, who came to dwell there, or 
examine into their past history. Christ was safe, 
but it was a strange alternative. 

He was fleeing from His own people, where He 
should have been joyfully welcomed as the fulfil- 
ment of the nation's hopes. A cruel king, a de- 
graded priesthood, a nation given up to formalism, 
were all that He could find to receive Him. The 
people were religious, but their religion was nar- 
row, intolerant, and petty. It never asked after 
God ; it was of the earth, earthy : and there was 
no chance for Jesus Christ to get a foothold in 



286 Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

such a reliction as that. It is a warnino: to our 
rehgious thoughts, to us who live in the light of 
religious privilege and knowledge. Keep religion 
pure, keep it high and lofty and spiritual. Never 
be satisfied with any other idea of it. Be ready to 
receive God in it, and let it be a fit place for God 
to dwell in. It should be a promised land, a land 
of rest to the weary, and of welcome to the Mes- 
siah ; it should have but one idea, — to make men 
know God. No ecclesiastical correctness, no spirit 
of philanthropy, no formal purity, no doctrinal 
rigor, can take the place of that. Christ may be 
driven from us, if that is all He finds ; or, at best, 
He will be the Master only of a small band of 
humble followers. Strangers shall supplant those 
who should know Him ; " they shall come from the 
east, and from the west, and from the north, and 
from the south, and shall sit down in the kingdom 
of God," and the children of the kingdom be cast 
out. Use privileges and opportunities rightly ; 
that is a lesson running all through the history of 
Christ and His relation to Israel. 

But here there is a very prominent element of 
comparison in this incident of the flight into Egypt. 
Does some one outside of religious life deride the 
way in which Christ is treated and received by 
religious men } does he say the Christ is safer out- 
side of the Church than He is in it 1 does he say 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 287 

that he does not despise Christ ? that he does 
nothing to injure Him, whereas He often receives 
wounds in the very house of His friends ? But 
does Christ amount to any thing at all with such a 
man ? Jesus was not persecuted in Egypt, but He 
amounted to nothing there ; we hear of no regard 
that He received. He was like every other babe ; 
He could do no more, and, in comparison with the 
philosophies and the business around, was not 
worth mention. Oh, no ! Egypt was worse than 
Palestine. There were shepherds, there was a 
Holy Family, there were to be disciples, in Pales- 
tine ; but there was no material for such in Egypt. 
Deadness is an enemy to Christ. Absorption in 
other things, respect to Christ because His 
claims are not worth consideration, — that is the 
Egyptian spirit ; and it is all around us. It must 
be broken up wherever it crusts over our hearts. 
Christ cannot penetrate it. You recall the recent 
picture of a French artist of the flight into Egypt. 
As the Holy Family rests in the stillness of the 
Eastern night, the Virgin, with her child, has found 
repose in the arms of the sphinx ; and the old reli- 
gion of an unspiritual people thus rescues for a mo- 
ment the infant power which, in the time to come, 
is to leave it desolate, the sight of a few curious 
travellers. Like the stony arms of that Egyptian 
figure is the reception, by many a man, of Christ. 



288 Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

It has no warmth, it opens no soul to His influ- 
ence, it lets Him go, and remains the same in its 
earthly views and interests. 

Eastern astrologers travelled a long way to 
find Jesus and worship Him. But when Jesus 
travelled a long way to Alexandrian philosophy, 
it had nothing to say to Him. Say something, 
think something, about this Saviour, about your 
relation to God. Who knows how many times He 
has been near you, and yet done nothing for you, 
because you cared nothing for Him } If Christ 
had to flee from Bethlehem, He also had to leave 
Egypt ; and He never returned there again. De- 
fective religion is bad, but let cold worldliness 
beware lest it is worse. Back and forth, from one 
to the other Christ passes. The danger is a dou- 
ble one. We must guard against both. We must 
have pure religion ; yes, but to have religion at all, 
we must feel that there are things above this 
world, and break away from our deadness, whether 
of worldly life or of philosophy, which says that 
Christ is nothing important, and that a spiritual 
message has no bearing for us. 

After the death of Herod, Jesus returned from 
Egypt. But it was not to go back to Bethlehem. 
He turns aside to Nazareth, a place which, for 
some reason, was looked upon contemptuously, 
and which gave to Jesus His name of the Naza- 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 289 

rene. The Gospel writer says that this also was a 
fulfilment of prophecy, and was meant to signify 
the humility and lowliness of character which the 
Saviour of the world was to bear. Bethlehem was 
the birthplace of David, and sacred memories 
clustered around it. Prophecy had designated it 
as the birthplace of the Messiah ; and to be 
born there was, of itself, evidence in favor of one 
claiming to be the Christ. And yet Jesus never 
referred to that fact of His nativity in the city 
of David ; He never tried to free Himself from 
the stain of being a Nazarene. Most willingly, 
through all His life. He carried that mark of hu- 
mility, which was a part of the flight into Egypt. 

In this view, that flight never departed from His 
life. If it was humiliating to go to Egypt after all 
the glories of the nativity and Epiphany, it was a 
part of the same humiliation that He should be 
known all His life as coming from Nazareth, and 
not from Bethlehem. And yet Nazareth was a 
better place for Christ. Bethlehem was a remote 
country village, relying on past glories. Nazareth 
was a bustling Galilean town, near to the most 
fertile and populous parts of the country, receiv- 
ing influences from all that went on in that 
strangely mixed population. There was more life 
around it, and it was life that Christ wanted to 
reach. There was no air of aristocratic respecta- 



290 Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

bility and seclusion about it, but there was all the 
activity of a near approach to the modern and 
present lives of men. It was a better place in 
which to learn men's wants and to minister to 
them. To such a place Jesus turned aside when 
He came back from Egypt, and we can well under- 
stand the new character that would be impressed 
upon His thoughts while living there as a boy. 

Humiliation and nearness to men, those two 
things were the outcome of the flight into Egypt 
for that great life. God called His Son out of 
Egypt, and these were the things that He brought 
with Him. Can we not understand it all "i Our 
religious feelings are happy and bright ; they are 
confident in all that is to come. And then comes 
the oppression of temptation or the defeat of sin : 
we are made to go into Egypt. And, when we 
come back, we are not the same : we are hum- 
bled. Religion is no longer clothed with glory 
alone : we have learned its difficulties ; we know 
the meaning of sin. We cannot rely upon beauti- 
ful services or upon religious pedigree : religion is 
the saving of the sinning soul by Christ. We ask 
no higher definition of it ; we hardly dare to dwell 
upon its glorious features, for fear men will be 
misled by them, and become mere ritualists or ec- 
clesiastical pedants. We are content to be called 
Nazarenes, sinners, if only God can be exalted. 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 291 

And then every such experience tells us of the 
practicalness of our religion. We must get it near 
to men ; we must bring it out where it can come 
in contact with the world. After every flight into 
Egypt, we leave Bethlehem, and go and dwell in 
Nazareth. We cease shutting up religion to mo- 
ments of meditation ; we stop looking upon it as a 
merely personal matter for ourselves. Doctrines 
that we have always heard, have new meanings, and 
Christ grows in nearness to us. We must apply 
every thing, we must carry the work of religion 
far and wide ; it must be a weapon wherewith 
to do service for our God. Happy are we as we 
have such experiences : we are following in the 
steps of our Master. It is thus that we grow ; it 
is under those very experiences of trial and temp- 
tation, which the parent so much dreads for his 
child, that that child's religion becomes more ear- 
nest and practical. God will care for it. If it has 
the spirit of Christ in it, it comes out better for 
all its trials. The world may not talk so much 
about it, and call it pure and innocent ; they may 
see only a sinning man that is striving to be bet- 
ter : but God knows how deep and earnest all that 
religion is now, and will bless it by teaching it 
even more constantly. We cannot afford to stop 
for comparisons or lamentations in our life. It 
will not do to be wishing ourselves in Bethlehem. 



292 Christ's Flight into Egypt. 

Nazareth is a better place for us, though it may not 
be quite so ea^y or fascinating. We want an ap- 
plied religion, and not a theoretical one ; we want 
a useful religion, and not a merely beautiful one. 

The beauty is all in the religion ; that will all 
come out in due time. Christ's living in Naza- 
reth did not do away with the fact that He was 
born in Bethlehem. He did His work in Naza- 
reth, and by that work all the glories of Beth- 
lehem had their true meaning given to them. 
Hundreds of people come back from travelling in 
Palestine every year, knowing not one true fact 
more of Christ. They have read their Bibles 
there, they have been enthusiastic over memo- 
ries and feelings ; but those make not Chris- 
tianity. This Nazareth of plain home-life is 
the place to learn and show Christ ; the inward 
experience of God's protection in our Egypts is 
the only thing that can give our religious fervor a 
true and substantial foundation. Here is our 
Holy Land, made sacred by the moments that 
Christ has walked with us in life. One Christian 
home is better than the cave of the nativity at 
Bethlehem, and it is only because of such homes 
that that cave is of interest to any one. And all 
the treasures we bring from that land of rich 
memories, in our Bibles or our travels, are made 
valuable by our use of them in our lives here. 



Christ's Flight into Egypt. 293 

Christ went into Egypt on account of other 
men's sins ; Herod's angry jealo.usy drove him 
thither. Our Egypts are prepared for us by our 
own sins. That is a difference of which we can 
never lose sight. But His experience under the 
sin of the world can teach us what shall be our 
experience under our sin if we take it with His 
guidance. It can be conquered. Can we not all 
recall sad flights and reverses in life } They are 
inevitable to us. The world has them ready for 
us. Thank God that the power of Him who met 
them and conquered is now with us ! Through 
Him we can go as sons of God, not as mere weak 
raen. He will lead us through them all, and bring 
us out safely. His life and His power meet us at 
the darkest moments. He is to be our guide and 
Saviour, our Lord, through every dark valley, even 
to death. And we bless God for this Saviour, 
who not only was born in Bethlehem, but fled into 
Egypt, and lived in Nazareth, that He might reign 
in heaven forever. 



XXI. 

THE WORK OF LENT. 

" Therefore now put off thy ornaments from thee, that I may 
know what to do tmto thee." — ExoDUS xxxiii. 5. 

IN the observance of Lent we are not doing a 
new thing. The very name of its opening 
day, Ash Wednesday, carries us back to the times 
of the Old Testament, when, stripping themselves 
of what was beautiful and attractive in life, the 
children of Israel expressed their sense of sorrow 
for sin, or their appreciation of the calamities 
which it had brought, by sitting in sackcloth and 
ashes. The same process of humiliation is neces- 
sary to-day ; and we change our usual customs, put 
away methods of life and modes of action, strip 
ourselves of ornaments of ordinary times, that 
we may express, like our brethren of old, before 
God, our sense of sorrow for sin, which is as uni- 
versal and destructive with us as it was with them. 
In these times of brighter and wider revela- 
tion, we ought to understand the meaning of such 

action better than they did. It ought to be 
294 



The Work of Lent. 295 

free from formalism ; for time and time again, 
since those habits of mourning came into exist- 
ence, God has told His people that it is substance 
and not form which He desires. All superstitious 
ideas ought to be banished, for we have learned, 
through Christ, of the nearness of God to man 
without the intervention of rites and ceremonies. 
It is a season with a likeness to Jewish ordi- 
nances, because man, in his nature and his wants 
before the presence of God, is ever the same ; it 
is a Christian season, because its one object is 
to make us know more of that nearness of God to 
man, which is the great fact of Christianity. In 
these words from the Old Testament we have one 
of God's most explicit statements of the need of 
such observance ; and we ask the meaning of that 
reason, which He assigns for a season of special 
penitence and humiliation, that all such services 
may be more reasonable and more real to our 
hearts and minds^ 

God wishes to know what to do with us. If 
the putting aside of ornaments, no matter how 
v^aluable or brilliant they may be, is the condition 
of that process, it ought to be done : for God's 
action must be full of power and of love ; and to 
be told that His hand is to be felt in our life, must 
imply that a blessing is to be bestowed upon us 
far beyond any thing that can come from any 



296 The Work of Lent. 

other addition. It is better to have God with us 
than any thing else. He is the source of good ; 
and any portion of the good of life, which may be 
our ornament, must be but a small blessing in 
comparison with His thought and effort for us. 
Sometimes what God would do for us seems to be 
harsh or even cruel ; we cry out against the dis- 
pensation that comes from His hand : and there is 
nothing to do but to go back to our fundamental 
belief and conception of God, as one in whom 
power and love meet, and to declare, " It is the 
Lord: let Him do what seemeth Him good." 
We would not interfere with any of His action 
upon us : we would not remove what serves to 
further such action ; we would not retain what 
tends to retard it. And that spirit, which is the 
only one that ever gives the key to involuntary 
deprivation of those ornaments upon which human 
hearts are set, equally inspires the action of volun- 
tary relinquishment, whether it be permanent or 
temporary. It is the Lord's command ; He has 
made it the condition of His work for us ; and 
that work is so valuable, so indispensable, that we 
gladly receive the condition. 

Never at any stage of His revelation has God 
ceased, in one form or another, to prescribe tempo- 
rary and voluntary relinquishments, in order that 
He may enter. We pass from the prescribed fasts 



The Work of Lent. 297 

of the old covenant to the words of Jesus, who, 
without reiterating such prescriptions, only said, 
that, when the bridegroom was taken away from 
them, the children of the bride-chamber would 
necessarily and naturally fast ; and we hear such 
words as " Enter into thy closet, and shut thy door," 
thereby leaving the world behind thee ; " Leave all 
that thou hast, and follow me ; " "If thy right hand 
offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee ; " and 
they are only types of the announcement of an 
alternative between the world and God which 
runs through His whole life, and inspires His 
whole service. The ornaments, or God's voice, — 
that is the simple form of choice which is thrust 
upon us over and over again in life, in alternatives 
of action, in circumstances of bereavement and 
loss, in our desires and our possessions. Lent 
would make the issue a very clear one as it asks 
us in accordance with God's word and the com- 
mand of His Church, to strip ourselves of many 
things which ornament our lives. It does it, not 
as a temporary thing only, although some of its 
features may be temporary, but that it may im- 
press upon us that which is being demanded of 
men every day and everywhere, and that it may 
prepare us for every occasion in which the word of 
God and the action of God can be obtained only 
at the sacrifice of our own comfort and desire. 



298 The Work of Lent. 

Although we can never enter into the full 
understanding of God's commands, because they 
cover so large a range of experience and life, 
that there is always more to learn of them, yet 
we are allowed to get glimpses of reasons for 
them, which show us how true they are, while 
they also suggest how much there is behind 
which we have yet to learn. The object of God's 
dealings with men is, that He may destroy their 
sin. And there is no more fruitful source of 
sin than those ornaments which He tells us to 
put away. The things which gather about our 
lives are causes of separation from our brother. 
Human souls are the same. When, in some 
moment of common experience, we get near to 
our brethren, we find that joy and suffering are 
very much alike in all the human family, and that 
much the same desires move us all ; and at all 
times we know that the beginnings and the end- 
ings of life are the same. There ought to be no 
sin between man and man, belonging as they do 
to the same family. But the very likeness under- 
neath intensifies the sense of difference in all the 
surroundings and circumstances of life. The 
struggle to improve those, brings us into rivalry 
and competition with our fellow-men. Envy and 
jealousy arise as the different degrees of success 
become evident ; misunderstandings result from 



The Work of Lent. 299 

the different points of view from which we see the 
things of life ; separation impresses itself upon 
all the life, alike of classes and of individuals, 
and the sense of brotherhood is gone. These 
are the results of our ornaments. We hang 
them out, and they become war-standards and 
battle-flags. We gaze upon them in the secrecy 
of our own hearts, and their numbers fill us with 
pride, or their fewness wears us out with repin- 
ings. We congratulate ourselves upon them, and 
straightway there is a desire for more, to be 
obtained at any expense of inconvenience or suf- 
fering to our brother. The innocence or the de- 
sirability of the ornament may make no difference 
in the result. Learning, applause, and culture 
may make us just as forgetful, or unsympathetic, 
or even cruel, towards others, as the more mate- 
rial possessions of life. 

W^e can see, therefore, that the command, *' Put 
off thy ornaments from thee, that I may know 
what to do unto thee," is like the call of a John 
the Baptist : Make the way plain, the path straight 
and level, for the coming of the Lord ; remove 
the stumbling-block which has been in thy own 
or thy brother's path. Men must learn to see 
their oneness as brothers, before sin can be done 
away; lives very different from each other must 
be placed side by side, and then new modes of 



300 The Work of Lent, 

thought and of comparison will at once enter. 
Possibly those against whom our thoughts have 
been bitterest, may have been carrying on a deeper 
and more intense battle with sin than we have ; 
but their shining ornaments have concealed the 
struggle from us, or our better-equipped life has 
not allowed us to see the greater nobility of their 
'Characters. If we could once step out of the world, 
and let the noise of its rivalries die down, how 
'much we should discover of what is going on about 
us and within us ! We can do so partially ; and 
the more complete we can make the elimination 
of worldly relations and cares, and the more thor- 
oughly we can come to understand just what we 
are in the sight of God, the more perfectly will 
the season prepare us for assuming again, and with 
•new hope, all the relations of life. How petty 
most of our sins are ! How often one word, which 
gives us a glimpse into the real condition of an- 
other's heart, makes us ashamed of some feeling 
which we have been cherishing toward him ! And 
the one cry of penitence, and the prayer for for- 
giveness and help, which we all together, through 
the season of Lent, without distinction of class or 
position, utter to God, will be truly effectual for 
the blessing of life, as that in which we pride our- 
selves is forgotten, that for which we despise 
others is put aside, and we strive to be God's chil- 



The Work of Lent. 301 

dren, and nothing else, in the sight of Him and of 
our brethren. 

But the sins against our brethren are not the 
only evil that our ornaments work, and do not 
constitute the only reason why they must be aban- 
doned before God can do His work for us. Those 
very sins spring from a deeper injury which has 
been done to our souls. These things that have 
attached themselves to life come to be regarded 
as its substance, and to regulate its whole move- 
ment. Gradually, by a process which is almost 
imperceptible, they present themselves as our reli- 
ance ; and moral retrogression sets in, so that we 
have no other standards but those of the world by 
which to live. Our thoughts of right and wrong 
'become regulated by conventionalities ; what is 
generally called wrong, we grant to be so, and 
know nothing of any deeper rule. Our motives 
for action become things of expediency, and are 
changed by every new tide in affairs. Our views 
are limited by the things of this life, and take 
into account no greater possibilities. We do 
not notice this ; but in all our communities 
there are men who have dropped out of the 
circle of religious life, because these very bless- 
ings in life have become their dependencies. 
And in all our lives there are modes of action, 
and deeds of omission and commission, which 



302 The Work of Lent. 

we excuse, because we have come to feel them 
to be necessary to us. 

Now, to such a state of a man's life, the words 
*'Put away thy ornaments " mean, Cease to depend 
upon the present condition and surroundings of 
life. Think of yourself as an immortal soul. Try 
to imagine yourself as cut off from all these pur- 
suits and surroundings, for so, in fact, you must be 
at some time ; and then, when these ornaments 
are put aside, count over the treasures of your life, 
and see whether there is enough left to support 
an immortal soul. That is the nature of the cry 
of religion against the things of this life, whether 
it be heard in the voice of the approaching Lenten 
season or from the mouth of some earnest reformer. 
It is often misunderstood. But it is not a wild,' 
an unreasoning, a fanatical cry : it has the deep- 
est meaning behind it. Savonarola, thundering 
against the follies of Florence, was carrying on 
the same battle for earnest living which we take 
up each Lent. There may be many dull ears into 
which the sound never comes, just as there were 
plenty of men in that mediaeval city to spurn or to 
persecute the prophet who told of coming destruc- 
tion. There are those to whom all thoughts of 
any life but that which they are living seems an 
empty dream ; and they settle down to their con- 
tented life, immersed in earthly interests and occu- 



The Work of Lent. 303 

pations. But to those of us who, in greater or less 
degree, have a desire to know the things of eternal 
life, let the nature of the call of such a season as 
this be plain, that we may the more truly under- 
stand it ourselves, and also carry it to others who 
do not hear it directly. 

It is a call to greater moderation and carefulness 
in the use of the things of this life, so that they 
shall not become our masters ; it is a call to exalt 
the true Master of our life, so that every ornament 
of our being shall be discarded forever, which is 
not worthy to minister to His glory, or which 
attempts to fight against His supremacy, so that 
all which remains shall be used in obedience to 
His commands, and in subservience to His pur- 
poses. It is by this test that innocent and sin- 
ful indulgence in the things of this life is to 
be discriminated, that the line of the too much 
and the too little is to be drawn, and that we 
are to be made men and women worthy and fit 
to use the world rightly. Such a putting aside 
of our ornaments as that, at this time, would 
prevent our eager rush to get them back again, 
and to use them as if our life depended upon them. 
It would stop the sacrificing of the best and 
brightest of our land to the customs of fashion or 
the demands of the world ; it would mark the 
Christian profession as the most reasonable and 



304 The IVork of Lent. 

far-seeing mode of life, and so draw to it those 
who, of themselves, would know nothing of its true 
blessing ; it would open such a door of refresh- 
ment to the world, that men would be glad to 
stream into it, and to secure more of the happi- 
ness to which it gave an entrance. Such is our 
work for others during this season, as well as for 
ourselves ; and the two works are one, so that they 
can never be separated. 

But why does God need that the ornaments 
of men's lives should be put off before He shall 
know what to do unto them "^ Is it not limiting 
His power, to say that He cannot deal with us 
as we are, with all our ornaments upon us .'* The 
work which God is to do for us has, for its 
greatest mark, that it is dependent upon what we 
are. It is the work of overcoming sin. If it 
were not for that, there would be no Lent, no 
work of redemption, no story of the death of 
an incarnate Saviour. God, when He made man, 
gave him all that he needed for full development 
and growth in every way. Creation on God's 
part was a full gift, so full that it even involved 
the possibility of sin. He bestowed upon man 
freedom of will, that he might use all these things 
rightly ; by that He made him His child, and 
granted him dignity and position above all other 
created things. Man's course was forward and 



The Work of Lent. 305 

upward, ever increasing in power and glory, while 
obedience and dependence upon God ruled bis 
action. No redemption would be necessary for 
such a being. Man's sin, his desire after the 
things of this world, his willingness to build up 
his life with those, created the great necessity. 
The self-will of man called upon God for new 
action, — action which His Divine wisdom could 
alone create, and which His Divine power could 
alone execute. That He may know what it shall 
be. He asks some indication of man's desire. It 
is not great, it is not that which any soul cannot 
render. His arm must alone bring the relief ; 
but, while every ornament of a false and worldly 
life is held devotedly and proudly, how can the 
relief ever find access to that life wrapped around 
with other things } The man's willingness to put 
those aside will determine what God shall do. 
There is nothing to do but to punish, to let the 
life which so persistently holds to what has been 
its destruction go its own sad way of separation 
from God, if there is no relaxing of the nervous 
grasp on earthly good and ornament. But at the 
very first sign of a willingness to put such things 
away, to bridle life's passion, and to restrain life's 
desire, the way of redeeming love is open. Man 
is ready ; and God knows what to do, and He is 
able to make him His child once more. 



3o6 The Work of Lent. 

That is to be the spirit of which Lent's re- 
nunciations are to speak. They are to tell, not 
of our conforming to an ecclesiastical or social 
custom, but of our willingness and eagerness to 
have God take us, and form us in Christ Jesus 
to what we were made to be. The way is open. 
God has gone before us : He has shown us what 
He wants to do for us in the story of the love 
and redemption of Jesus Christ, which has been 
told to us over and over again, but which has 
never done its full work, because our hearts were 
elsewhere; our desires were not toward God and 
His glory, but were fixed upon our present life 
and its ornaments. There are indications enough 
of that fact in the selfish absorption of the life 
which surrounds us ; in the small proportion of 
our charities to our luxuries ; in the money squan- 
dered on amusement, while souls are everywhere 
living without the knowledge of God the Saviour ; 
in the fortunes which are given to those who 
for an hour or two minister to our pleasure, while 
earnest ministers of the Gospel of Christ are 
allowed to starve through years of faithful labor. 
But already the first hours of a season of self- 
examination have made us, I hope, look within, 
and deeply, for more personal signs of the hinder- 
ances which oppose the Gospel of Christ, — in 
stunted devotion ; in heartless prayers, contrasted 



The Work of Lent. 307 

with eager business action or pleasure-seeking ; 
in unwillingness to give to God the hours of His 
own day in His own house ; in the small attention 
given to things of the soul and of eternity; in 
disregard of our Saviour and of His will ; in small 
growths of religious knowledge, while everywhere 
else cultivation of ourselves is the rule ; in aver- 
sion to conscientious duties, and a desire to avoid 
them. Surely there is reason why God has not 
been able to do what He has so long wanted. 
He has been waiting to be gracious, and we have 
made His waiting longer and more painful. Now 
let us rejoice at this season for putting away the 
mere ornaments of life, and in it open our ear 
anxiously, constantl}^ eagerly, to hear the word of 
His gracious intention. God's treasury is full 
of the true ornaments of life. He readily offers 
them to us. Receive them as readily, and the 
world's ornaments will lose their false glitter; 
our hearts will cease to desire them with that 
eager covetousness, which conceals all the better 
impulses of the soul, and God will be able to do 
for us all the deep purposes of His wisdom and 
His love. 



XXII. 

THE SUFFERING OF CHRIST. 

"/^?r Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the tmjust^ 
that He might bring us to God. " — I Peter iii. i8. 

THE great figure put before our minds by these 
words is that of a suffering Saviour. And 
by that word ** also " the apostle Peter, who had 
been a witness of Christ's sufferings, places them 
in connection with all the experiences of ordinary 
life. We sometimes fear to do so. It seems as 
if they were too great a fact to be placed side by 
side with the sufferings of ordinary men. They 
have been justly exalted for so long a time as the 
very power of salvation for the world of men, that 
it often seems as if they could have no relation 
or similarity to the ordinary experiences of that 
world. And so we 'are glad of the authority of an 
apostle for the fact, that whatever gave those suf- 
ferings power, can be found as an element of power 
in all suffering, and that he who understands them 
and uses them will find that all the suffering of 
the world has a new aspect and power in his sight. 
Suffering is universal in the world. It comes 
308 



The Suffering of Christ. 309 

from the first wailings of the infant to the last 
enfeebled cry of old age. It is found in the 
silent endurance of weakness and in the bold 
struggle of strength. It is moral and physical : it 
perplexes our minds, troubles our nerves, tasks 
our bodies, wounds our hearts, injures our spirits. 
It is in every station and rank of life. It is so 
various in its manifestations, that it seems as if 
we took a new lesson in it every day. Sometimes 
it comes by the forces of nature, and again by the 
acts of man. Life and death both bring it ; sick- 
ness and health only vary its manifestations. So 
universal a fact must mean a great deal ; and, if we 
could only seize its meaning rightly, we should 
know of God's wisdom and of His intention for 
this world of men. To pass it by, to try to deny 
it, to make the ignoring of it a victory over it, is 
very short-sighted policy ; it is what we would do 
with no other fact of like universal significance 
and power. And therefore, when Christ begins 
His Gospel with the fact of suffering, when He 
lays His hand on that which all the world recog- 
nizes, but tries to ignore, we are at a loss whether 
to admire most the wisdom or the love of the 
method ; together the boldness and the reason- 
ableness of what He does startle us into asking 
the secret of one who could thus utilize the world's 
greatest enemy, and turn in defence of mankind 



3IO The Suffering of Christ. 

the very weapons which have so long wrought 
their destruction. 

A Gospel which saves men by joy, by victory, 
by glory, is closed to half the world : one that 
saves them by suffering is open to all ; it appeals 
to all mankind. He who, out of what the world 
despised or dreaded, has been able to bring a bless- 
ing to mankind, is crowned with special honor, 
as one who just so far has moved above the ordi- 
nary laws of life, and has possessed an insight 
beyond his fellow-men. The man who taught to 
his fellow-men the uses of destructive fire was the 
hero of ancient mythology ; the men who have 
bridled the lightnings, and chained the forces 
of air and water, are the great names of modern 
civilization. But what shall we say of Him, who 
stopped not with the powers and material of 
the earth, but, going into the heart and life of 
man, found there the fact of suffering, and out 
of that formed the corner-stone of His kingdom "^ 
who, out of the cries and groans to which we close 
our ears, made the praises of God resound through 
the world "^ The secret of such a transformation 
as that must become known to us before we un- 
derstand Christ and His work. Now and then we 
see it in some lesson of patient suffering, of puri- 
fied character, of consecrated energy under trial, 
to which our experiences give us access ; and we 



The Suffering of Christ. 3 1 1 

treat such things as accidental and personal. No: 
they are the very best illustrations of Christ's 
working ; they have the characteristic of all His 
life ; they show that there is something in the 
world greater than the power of earth — and to 
learn that, is the object of our special knowledge 
and study of a suffering Saviour. 

In this bold action the first element of strength 
is, that all suffering is traced to one source. Suffer- 
ing is made to flow from sin. Christ suffered for 
sin, suffered as a criminal, suffered because of sin, 
under the weight of sin. In this light we see that 
the mode and occasion of Christ's death had great 
significance. They were meant to express the 
fact, that whatever He borp through all His life, — 
the poverty, the opposition, the misunderstanding, 
the faithlessness, — all were connected with sin. 
He who endured them, took them as part of the 
experience of a world, in which sin was an all-per- 
vasive fact. As He identified Himself with that 
world which even condemned Him, the perfectly 
pure one, to die as a criminal. He expressed for- 
ever the fact that suffering flows from sin. He 
told it by experience, not by any doctrinal state- 
ment, or by any inferences from the first entrance 
of sin into the world. He with His Divine wis- 
dom and life, stated decidedly that of which we 
with our smaller sight get little glimpses. 



312 The Suffering of Christ. 

For as we see how many forms sin takes, and 
that from each one of those forms there flows a 
special stream of evil results, we must be prepared 
for this statement of Christ's life and experience. 
Crime, selfishness, carelessness, weakness, — those 
are all forms of sin ; misuse or neglect of human 
power given by God, — that is the very essence 
of sin, whether it shows itself in the outbreaks of 
depraved life, or in the insinuating and pervasive 
faults of sheltered and protected existence. And 
it is from those things, mingling in every form and 
degree, that our sufferings come. It is those things 
poured into the world from the very beginning, 
and through all the course of human experience, 
which have made this world a suffering world. 
For this earth which we inhabit is a splendid heri- 
tage ; it moves by laws which, the more we know 
them, occasion so much the more wonder and 
admiration. It yields itself to man's needs with a 
richness which each generation has cause to ad- 
mire anew. Suppose that from the beginning 
every man had used it rightly, always with a sense 
of responsibility to God, always with a feeling of 
love to his neighbor, always with a mind eager to 
learn the laws of that which his Father had given 
him : how, under such treatment, the load of the 
world's miseries would have been avoided ! One 
hand inspired by such feelings to-day lifts an enor- 



The Suffering of Christ. 313 

mous weight from human shoulders. We trace 
back the events of our own life one single year, and 
see how, if we had been better, we should have 
been happier ; and we picture all the race of men 
retracing their steps over the track of the ages, 
and the goal they reach must be happiness. The 
wisdom of Christ, the singleness of His purpose, 
the central power of His action, start out before 
us then ; and we feel that He was indeed one 
who was fitted to deal with the great fact of human 
suffering, as He could thus put His finger on the 
very place whence it all flowed. 

We men are not ready to acknowledge this fact 
of sin's power ; it seems as if it made our case only 
darker and more desperate. Suffering is on the 
surface ; but shall we deliberately say that in the 
very depths of our being we are diseased .-* Shall 
we do that which would seem to turn struggle into 
despair.'^ Is it not better to do all that we can to 
put away the causes of suffering which lie on the 
surface, and which we can easily alleviate, and so 
get down to the deeper troubles } We ought to 
have learned that it is only by getting at the true 
nature of a difficulty that we are able to conquer 
it; the new and deeper knowledge opens ways of 
approach unthought of before. There stood in 
proud seclusion the steepest peak in the Alps. 
Men looked at it, and said that human foot could 



314 T^^^ Suffering of Christ. 

never scale its heights. Bolder spirits tried every 
way which they could devise, approached it from 
all sides but one; and they succeeded in reaching 
certain points, but still there towered above them 
that inaccessible point. At length a wiser, more 
experienced eye was turned to that very side which 
had been pronounced evidently impossible ; and, 
as he thus faced what had seemed the most de- 
spairing side of the problem, he saw that the strata 
of the earth below, broken sharp off in the up- 
heaval of that majestic peak, furnished a series of 
steps which made the passage possible directly to 
the summit ; and now every year even unexperi- 
enced feet make their way over the path thus 
opened. If any of us stand wondering how the 
mountain of our own or the world's suffering shall 
be conquered, and have never seen the path opened 
on the side of man's sin, have tried every way but 
the fight against sin, have shed tears over every 
calamity but the depravity of our nature, have done 
every thing but confess our sins in the sight of 
God, nay, have dismissed that as too dark and hard 
a side of the problem for us to face, now let the 
way opened by One who knew the secrets of our 
nature and of the generation of that mountain of 
suffering, — let that way be the one for our feet to 
follow. Thousands have been over it with Him, 
and conquered their suffering through the knowl- 



The Suffering of Christ. 315 

edge and power which He gave. And to-day His 
Cross says to us all, " Suffer for sin ; and in doing 
that, through Him conquer all suffering." 

One of our greatest troubles, under the suffer- 
ing which we feel ourselves or see in the world, 
is, that it does not seem to come upon the right 
people. We could bear with a great deal of suf- 
fering, if this sense of injustice was not often 
mingled with it ; we Could more readily admit the 
connection between sin and suffering if we always 
saw suffering follow sin, and happiness as the 
return for goodness. But too often we hear it 
cynically said, that the good son has to suffer for 
the reckless and selfish enjoyment of the bad 
one ; and from our lips the complaining word often 
comes, " I do not see what I have done to merit 
this affliction." We have already seen that the 
problem of human suffering is one which men 
have given up in despair, and therefore we have 
no reason to be surprised at any difflcult features 
of it which appear in our daily experience. But 
when this great Master approaches this very fact 
of suffering, as the one which He will use in His 
work, we have reason to expect a word of authority 
from Him on this most distressing feature of it. 
And it is here; "the just for the unjust," Christ 
suffered. That runs through all His life, — the 
thought that it was the very sinlessness of His 



3i6 The Suffering of Christ. 

life that made Him able to do the work for sinful 
men, that made Him able to take up the load of 
sin. The fact that He came from the Father, and 
was ever bound to the Father, was the very thing 
that made Him able to call men back to the Father. 
It is the privilege of strength to suffer for weak- 
ness. As it does so, strength is glorified ; it con- 
quers weakness, it spreads the power of its own 
life, it becomes strength in its right place. The 
foolishness of evil men and of bad policy involves 
a nation in war ; and then the best part of that 
nation has to come to the front, — the wisest states- 
men, the greatest generals, the bravest soldiers. 
And they have to suffer, and perhaps die, for the 
■nation, which foolishness and wickedness, that 
cannot save, have injured. What shall we say as 
they thus make their names glorious, and their 
strength counteracts the weakness of the land "^ 
Surely we would not pity them ; we would feel 
that they were doing the very thing for which 
they had their strength. Such things are written 
out in the field of our larger and better experience, 
that we may be saved from small fault-finding 
in our ordinary life, where merit does not seem 
to regulate happiness. Those are the examples 
from human experience which can solve for us 
the distressing problems of the good suffering 
for the bad. But in the imperfection of human 



The Suffering of Christ. 317 

life, in the share which we all have in the sin of 
the world,- they do not have their true force until 
we see them carried out in their perfection in the 
death of Christ. We know not the work which 
that death performed : our sight is too short for 
us to perceive all the evil effects of sin which 
it counteracted, all the deep connections of a 
disordered universe which it set right. But we 
know that it was because He had the might of 
the Son of God that He could do the work, we 
know that it was because He was above the 
world of sinning men that He could suffer for 
their sins, and so we are forever bound to Him as 
our Saviour. We follow Him who suffered for 
us. These words of the Old Testament describ- 
ing the position of David have their fulfilment : 
" I have laid help upon one that is mighty." 
Only the mighty can help ; and, as He thus helps, 
we look to His might as the reason for it, and 
through the work for us we find our Saviour. It 
is not gratitude alone, — that, indeed, movies us as 
we think of what He did for us, — but it is the 
opening of the source of strength by which He 
was able to do it. We come to Him through 
gratitude; and, as we reach Him, we find Him one 
who is mighty to save, because He could bring 
us near to God. 

This shows us the meaning and power of the 



3 1 8 The Suffering of Christ. 

last clause of our text. The apostle seems to be 
unable to keep the form of illustration perfect as 
he approaches that great fact. He has been say- 
ing that Christ's sufferings were so like the suf- 
ferings of the disciples, that they could feel the 
sustaining power of them. But here it is not 
likeness, it is dependence, that is brought out. 
These sufferings were to bring to God the very 
men who were now exhorted to imitate them. 
Exhortation and illustration mingle together, and 
so it must ever be. It is utterly useless to hold 
up a great example unless you can get at the 
secret of his power. Never were they to forget 
that they had been brought to God by those suf- 
ferings. They had opened His love. They had 
drawn to Him who was able to reveal God to them. 
They had made the world a different place, one 
that had the power and presence of God as 
well as of man in it ; never were they to forget 
that. But, as they remembered it, it would affect 
their lives, and change the whole character of 
them. The mystery of life's power would be 
made theirs. They, too, would have but one object, 
— to bring men to God. For what good is it to 
lift the burden off men's shoulders for a moment, 
if it falls back again in the same place } Is not 
that like the mere aid to a poor man by the 
temporary relief of alms, of which we hear so 



The Suffering of Christ. 319 

much condemnation to-day ? Why lift the weight, 
if there is no assurance against the future ? But 
to bring a man to God, to speak every word and 
to do every action so that men shall feel the fact 
that the strength which inspired us came not from 
ourselves, but from Him who revealed God, — 
that is to perform a Christian's duty for the world. 
Until one could come who could bring men to 
God, the load of suffering in the world rested 
unlightened and unsupported. He who could 
slip out from under it for a moment was happy ; 
he who found a breathing-place under it, where 
it pressed not too heavily, could philosophize about 
life and its meaning. But when He came who 
knew the Father, He must take His place under 
the heaviest part of that load, and feel its pressure 
on every side. How much meaning there was to 
those words of Christ to His disciples, "Ought not 
Christ to have suffered } " He showed them that 
it was contained in the prophecies of the older 
saints ; we to-day, farther on in God's develop- 
ment of His world, find the same great fact in all 
the experiences of Christian life since. Suffering 
had to be conquered by suffering. The Captain 
of our salvation had to be made perfect by suffer- 
ing : He was not the perfect Captain without that. 
The most powerful, the one to whom all the power 
of God belonged, must bring it to help the world 



320 The Suffering of Christ. 

of suffering and of sinful men ; He must stand 
with the world to which He came, suffer for it 
that He might make it His forever. 

Never was there a time when the suffering of 
the world was so keenly felt as it is to-day. There 
is probably no more suffering in the world than 
there has been in any past age ; but men feel it 
more keenly, and know that something must be 
done about it. They rebel against it for them- 
selves and for others. So far, at least, the Master's 
wisdom and method have prevailed ; but their 
real power is bound up with deeper truths of the 
source and of the cure of sin, as we have seen 
to-day. We want the whole of His work ; and 
therefore a philanthropic age needs the Cross, men 
anxious to alleviate the sufferings of the world 
need to have their own hearts broken for their sins, 
and all of us need to cling to these events of the 
suffering and death of Christ, and to feel that they 
contain the very power of our lives within them, — 
the power of forgiveness and redemption, the power 
of happiness, the power of true labor, the power of 
the life eternal for this world and for the world 
that is to come. So, rejoicing in the Cross of the 
Master, we shall rejoice in our own crosses, and 
bearing them, by the power of Him who died for 
us, enter into the kingdom where there shall be 
no more suffering or sin. 



XXIII. 

THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST. 

^^Behig put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the spirit^ ■ 
I Peter iii. i8, last clause (Revised Version). 



N^O man ever yet came out of a great work the 
same as he went into it ; he has always lost 
something, and gained something. A great effort 
for a noble purpose taxes a man's strength, it 
exhausts some of that physical power on which 
he has to draw ; but it builds up character, confi- 
dence, and reputation. A great effort for a self- 
ish purpose drains a man's moral resources, he 
has to surrender nobler considerations and hisrher 
purposes ; but it leaves him better off in the things 
of this world, with a larger fortune, and a greater 
command of earth's luxuries. It is this process 
of gain and loss to which our attention is called in 
the review of Christ's death and resurrection. It 
was a great transaction, nothing less than the at- 
tempt to overthrow the reign of sin and suffering 
in the world. The character and success of the 
great work would be largely indicated by the 

32 J 



322 The Resurrection of Christ. 

effect on Him who undertook it ; the question 
which all must ask is, What part of Him gained, 
and what part of Him lost ? As that is known, 
it ought to determine whether it is a work in which 
we wish to join. 

Flesh and spirit were both strong in Christ 
through all His life. We hear nothing of a frame 
enfeebled by indulgence, or exhibiting signs of 
weakness, throughout His career. His spirit was 
always calm and strong under all circumstances. 
Then came the contest with sin and suffering, and 
the body succumbed. It suffered, and went down 
into the grave. We are not surprised at it ; we 
rejoice that it was able to endure so much, for we 
feel sure that it contended strongly to the last. 
When its work was through, the spirit, which had 
never been daunted, which had relied upon the 
Father in its darkest moments, had an opportunity 
to show its strength. It was the spirit of the Son 
of God. It belonged to Him who was the incar- 
nate Son of God ; and it must take that same body, 
and show its own power, and do what the flesh 
had been unable to do. Jesus was as vulnerable 
in the flesh as all other men were. When He said 
to the disciples, "■ The spirit indeed is willing, but 
the flesh is weak," He was stating a fact, not only 
of their experience, but of His own. He was 
speaking of flesh in its own nature, and not as 



The Resurrection of Christ. 323 

enfeebled by sin. He was uttering no reproach to 
them for their weakness : He was only drawing 
forth, from His own deep knowledge, a fact which 
they were too likely to overlook. In the great 
transaction He must give up the victory of the 
flesh ; its weakness must be proved, however great 
the humiliation which that might involve. But 
what was lost there, must be gained elsewhere. 
The spirit must assert itself : it must be seen to 
be the life-guard of the body ; it must be evident 
as the great protecting, rescuing power. And 
when that was once done, there was no defeat. 
What had been lost by the flesh had been more 
than made up by spirit, and the great transaction 
was a victory. 

Can we wonder, then, at the Christian's joy at 
Easter } It is not as a single event by itself, that 
the resurrection stirs our hearts : it rs because it 
is connected with the whole nature of our being, 
with the whole work of Christ's life, and with the 
mysteries of our existence, and of the world for- 
ever. It throws a flood of light upon them all ; 
it takes a hundred analogies that are scattered 
through life, and gives them meaning ; it groups 
together many facts in one consistent whole. The 
relation between flesh and spirit is so constant a 
thing, that any thing which sheds light upon it 
must raise a shout of joy through all the brother- 



324 The Resurrection of Christ. 

hood of man. It is not alone a band of true dis- 
ciples receiving back a Master which keeps the 
feast : it is the whole race of men, helped in their 
daily struggles, which rejoices at this overwhelm- 
ing announcement of their truest position and 
greatest power. 

In this light we feel that we have no right to be 
surprised or confounded at the fact of the resur- 
rection. We see spirit triumphing over flesh 
everywhere ; not always, but on every side and in 
all departments, giving us the hope and key to 
this great fact. A poor weakened body labors 
under pain and disease for years ; but the mind 
grows brighter day by day, and the spirit becomes 
more refined. Perhaps by influence, perhaps by 
words, it shows mysteries of thought and feeling 
which healthier men would never have found. 
Men deprived of some faculty, which we think 
indispensable to our success in the world, have, by 
courage and patience, seemed to prove to us that 
our bodily endowments are more than true spirits 
ought to need, as they with less powers of the 
flesh distance those that have more. Two young 
men start in life, one with the healthy, sound body, 
the other with the cultivated mind and disciplined 
spirit ; and, in ways that are utterly unperceived at 
first, the latter finds his short path to success, 
while the other is still plodding on. The little 



The Resurrection of Christ. 325 

child, by its gentle, loving spirit, breaks into the 
hard life that no material motives could move, and 
where rough, fleshly hands have utterly failed. A 
nation is strong under a tyrannical hand which 
seems to repress all nobleness of feeling and 
purity of life ; and one brave man raises his voice, 
and stirs the sleeping spirit of the nation, and a 
reformation or a revolution follows. An institu- 
tion has outlived its day, its mode of action has 
its reasons among the things of the past ; but its 
spirit passes into the era of a new day, and it lives 
again in many forms through succeeding genera- 
tions. I need not multiply examples. It some- 
times seems as if spirit could do any thing ; and 
it can, if it is the right spirit. It is its duty to 
animate the flesh, and it shows itself able to do 
it ; and time after time it manifests its ability far 
above and beyond all the powers of flesh, mak- 
ing that flesh do things for which it has seemed 
to have no capability. 

Now let it be the perfect spirit, the spirit of the 
Son of God, and directly in a line with all our ex- 
periences is that resurrection from the dead. The 
very weakness of flesh which makes the resurrec- 
tion so wonderful, makes it the more natural. If 
flesh is a dead, sluggish thing, never accomplish- 
ing any thing until spirit moves it, so much the 
greater is the expectation of our minds as we hear 



326 The Resurrection of Christ. 

of the power of the Divine spirit approaching it 
with its marvellous forces. Just because dead 
bodies do not rise, we believe that Christ must 
rise. We find no hope of the resurrection but in 
the greatness of Christ, in His intimate and per- 
sonal connection with the Father. It was the 
Father's witness to His being the Son of God ; 
in that He has raised Him from the dead. We 
exclaim with St. Paul, " Why should it be thought 
a thing incredible with you, that God should 
raise the dead } " You men who, by the power 
of souls given you by God, are forever brush- 
ing obstacles from your path, are forever raising 
dead material to positions of importance and influ- 
ence, which it could not have occupied without 
you, who are forever infusing into this world and 
its substance a portion of your power, are you 
the limits of that strange and effective work } 
Can it go no farther than you carry it ? Cannot 
He who gave you all your power, as He bound 
your soul to your body, by that same spirit, of 
which you are a part, do things which you have 
never seen done .-* Can He not accomplish, by 
His great revelation of Himself, that toward 
which your eyes have always been set "^ It is 
good to know that Easter paths are no strange 
ones to our human feet ; that the flowers which 
adorn them are brighter and richer forms of those 



The Resurrection of Christ. 327 

which our hands are plucking every day, in our 
use of human energy and spirit given us by our 
God ; that the songs we raise are purer and better 
strains of those notes of real victory and power, 
that constantly make the world cheerful ; that the 
raising of the great, the only-begotten Son of God 
was a greater manifestation of that power of the 
Father of our spirits, by whose strength alone 
we live and accomplish any thing in this material 
world. 

Spirit is nobler than flesh. Place two men side 
by side, one of whom has always lived for the 
flesh, the other of whom has always tried to find 
the spiritual side of every thing, and of every 
event with which he has come in contact. The 
former weighs you down with his grossness. His 
talk of the pleasures of the table, his gossipy nar- 
ration of things that have taken place, his dull, 
unimaginative dealing with all that happens, his 
narrow interests and selfish aims, they are dread- 
fully unsatisfying and wearisome. The other 
always seems to be buoyant with joy and hope of 
something better. He hates all grossness enough 
to drop it out of his life ; and yet, with a sympathy 
with all souls, he finds gleams of hope in those of 
whom the world can say nothing but evil. You 
know the two types of men, and of the approaches 
to them in every degree and form, from your daily 



328 The Resurrection of Christ, 

experience with those about you ; you know it 
still more from the experiences within you. 

Every transaction upon which you enter has its 
two sides : it can exalt the flesh, and kill the 
spirit ; or it can kill the flesh, and exalt the spirit. 
Whether we speak of trials or of temptations, it 
is all the same. Under the first, men may lose 
their courage ; under the latter, they may lose 
their purity and nobleness : and both of those are 
possessions of the spirit. When either of those 
is gone, the triumph is on the wrong side of man's 
nature. You deal with the men and women, or 
with the world of material, and you find that it 
takes a definite struggle to keep the spirit alive. 
Every thing says, " Strive for earthly advance- 
ment, for worldly gain, for bodily pleasure." As 
life opens before us, we find that there is more 
than one question to answer in life, What shall 
we do 1 there is also that other question. How 
shall we do it.-* You may come out of a suc- 
cessful business or social career with all that the 
flesh can possibly give you, and find that the vir- 
tues of the spirit — the unselfishness, the purity, 
the honor, the thought of better things — have been 
put out of existence ; you are quickened in the 
flesh, you are put to death in the spirit. 

Here, again, we see that the resurrection of 
Christ was not an isolated fact, and did not stand 



The Resurrection of Christ. 329 

alone. It gathers to itself all the words of the 
Sermon on the Mount, all the exhortations of 
nobleness of life, and living above this world, 
which had been dropping from Jesus' lips ever 
since He began His ministry. They cannot stand 
alone ; they ask a great completion, a victory on 
their side, that they may have power, and not 
meet with discouragement. It seems as if Christ 
would say, " I appreciate how great a weight of 
conduct I have put upon you ; I would help you 
bear it. I know how the forces of the flesh press 
on ev^ry side ; a greater force of the spirit shall 
be with you through me. See what the spirit can 
do to the flesh, and be encouraged in every battle." 
The power of a risen Saviour is to show itself in 
spiritual lives. Do not be dismayed by that word 
"spiritual," as if it meant some kind of invisible 
pietistic existence, which had no beauty in it ; for 
remember that the power of the risen Saviour did 
not leave the body in the grave, and walk unclothed 
among men : it brought that body forth to new life, 
and placed it on its feet among men. And so the 
power of the resurrection will go into our business, 
and make it more than money-getting, by bringing 
to light the true spirit of serving God, and devel- 
oping His world ; it will enter our amusements, 
and save us from debasing them to bodily relaxa- 
tions, and from turning Divine music to low and 



330 The Resurrection of Christ. 

sensual uses ; it will enter our houses, and sweep 
from our tables the literature that dares to be any 
thing but pure and ennobling ; it will be in our 
families, training our children to know and desire 
something more than earthly advancement and 
position ; it will help us in the performance of 
every bodily action, and in the use of all this earth, 
to be noble and pure in motive and deed. It 
speaks of delicacy of feeling, grace of bearing, and 
refinement of intercourse, not by rules for the sur- 
face of life, but by the presence of that power 
which finds out our spirits, as surely as the spring 
sun finds out the seeds and buds. There is not a 
department of life wherein the presence of a risen 
Saviour will not be an encouragement to spirit to 
rise and assert itself as really existent, and rightly 
dominant in every action that is worth doing. Do 
you say that this may demand the giving-up of 
certain things 1 Then let them go ; be " put to 
death in the flesh," if you can but *' live in the 
spirit." That was Paul's desire : " If by any 
means I might attain to the resurrection of the 
dead." It was a matter of present attainment in 
the triumph of the spirit day by day ; and for that 
we, too, are to labor, if our Easter joy and songs 
do indeed mean all that they say. 

We saw that this greatest feature of Christ's 
resurrection was based on the fact that no man 



The Resurrection of Christ. 331 

comes out of a transaction the same as he went 
into it. The same fact can lead us to the most 
complete participation in that resurrection, to 
which our minds are always turned. Are we to 
rise as He did ? Had it hope for victory to any 
beyond Himself ? We never come out of the great 
transaction of life the same as we went into it. 
We begin with spirit in the infant body, so unable 
to provide for itself. 

" Not in entire forgetfulness, 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 
From God, who is our home." 

And then the flesh grows and asserts itself, until 
at length its hour of weakness comes, and, in the 
failure of disease or of old age, it loses its power, 
and sinks once more into the earth. What happens 
then, we ask .? What has been going on during 
that process of changing life ? Is there spirit 
enough to repair the injury .? In that great trans- 
action during the reign of the body, has the spirit 
lost all knowledge of its Father } Have the affini- 
ties with better things, which made it welcome so 
readily in early days the thoughts of heaven that 
were given it, been so annihilated that it can no 
longer recognize their truth and power 1 or has it 
been tracing the hand of that Father in all the 



332 The Resurrection of Christ. 

arrangements and dispensations of life, learning of 
Him in all the thoughts of its quieter moments, in 
all the action of its busier days ? Has it lived 
here as if it belonged to God, or belonged to the 
earth ? Has it asserted and cultivated its superi- 
ority to the flesh, or bowed to its supremacy at 
every step ? 

We never have any doubt as to that question 
about Christ. We find a clearer view and state- 
ment of His nearness to the Father coming out 
each day, as His life goes on. It flourishes, not 
in spite of the world, but because of it. More and 
more He is bound to Him, until at last, in the 
great occasion of His death, it is not surprising 
that the trained and strengthened spirit conquers 
and raises Him. The power of God is met by the 
love of the Son, and the two work together for 
the happy result. God could not leave His soul in 
Hades, He could not suffer His Holy One to see 
corruption. We can all tell of lives that have so 
followed Him, have so learned of God's presence 
and love in the world through Jesus Christ, that at 
every step in life their spirits have grown stronger, 
and without effort, nay, of necessity, our hearts 
include them in the Easter rejoicing, because we 
know which side of them the great transaction of 
life strengthened. 

Flesh has its day now : its reign is not yet over. 



The Resurrection of Christ. 333: 

The Son of God has not yet shown all His power- 
in the Church and in the souls of those who are; 
His. Flesh is showing its weakness day by day;; 
kingdoms rise and fall, earthly movements wax; 
and wane, the generations come and go. Andi 
when its weakness is fully shown, then the spirit 
of the Lord shall triumph; and with the resurrec- 
tion body, with the new heavens and the new 
earth, the great transactions of creation and re- 
demption ended, the power of the Lord shall be 
revealed as it was in the garden of old on the first 
Easter morning. We live in resurrection times. 
Do not live as if God were absent from the earth :: 
let the revelation of Christ guide you to the great 
consummation. *' If Christ be in you, the body is. 
dead because of sin ; but the Spirit is life because, 
of righteousness. " Be the sons of God now ; and 
then, through the grave and gate of death, you shall 
pass to your joyful resurrection : and that victory 
shall be but the complete revealing of the power 
of that God and Saviour, whom you have followed 
and served all your life. 



XXIV. 

THE ASCENSION OF CHRIST. 

*^ And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came 
^down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.^'' — 
John iii. 13. 

THE ascension of Christ often seems to sepa- 
rate us from Him. Not only the wonder of 
•the act itself, but the fact that it took Him away 
:from earth and the companionship of men, seems 
•to make it like a great door that shuts upon the 
■wondrous life, and excludes us from that fellow- 
;ship with it for which its other events had led us 
tto hope. And, when the life of Christ seems thus 
fCnclosed between the wonder of the incarnation 
at one end and the wonder of the ascension at 
the other, it will often lose its naturalness, and 
become a little episode by itself, which we know 
not how to use, or when to summon to our help. 

Any such restricted idea of the ascension as a 
convenient and suitable way of closing the earthly 
life of Christ, disappears as we hear, in this verse, 
Christ referring to the ascension as a thing which 
already belonged to Him, and distinguished Him 

334 



The Ascension of Christ, 335 

from other men. For He uttered these words at 
the very beginning of His ministry, as a part of 
His conversation with Nicodemus. Whatever 
power took Him away from the earth, as the dis- 
ciples stood looking up into heaven, was in Him, 
therefore, at that early day. The elements of that 
wonderful departure were present in all the events 
of His life, which approach so near to our own 
experience ; and the last and the greatest miracle 
only put those elements into their most striking 
form, by which men might be led to recognize 
their greatness and glory. The ascension, thus 
intimately connected with all the life of Christ, 
tells us that the power of that life consists not in 
its separation from men, but in its nearness to 
them. No miracle hedges it in, but each miracle 
rather opens the way to its treasures. As the old 
poet put it, — 

" Christ never did so great a work, but there 
His humane nature did in part appeare; 
Or ne'er so mean a piece, but men might see 
Therein some beames of His divinitie." 

To see rightly the conditions and circumstances 
of the great works, will fill all the meaner pieces 
with that lustre, to which the divinity which is in 
them entitles them. He was the ascended Lord 
in the presence of timid and ignorant Nicodemus, 



33^ The Ascension of Christ. 

in the chamber at Jerusalem, in the darkness of 
night, as much as He was in the open air, with 
a band of loving and devoted disciples viewing 
His departure from them. That last action was 
unique : there was nothing like it. No man hath 
so ascended but He. But, as the things which 
made Him thus ascend are in other men, the as- 
cension becomes a permanent fact for redeemed 
human nature, as it was for Christ while on earth; 
and heaven is ever open to us, as it was to Him. 

Two things, Christ says, distinguish His char- 
acter as ascended, and therefore we may suppose 
that they make up the power of the ascension. 
**And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but 
He that came down from heaven, even the Son of 
man which is in heaven." Take the first of them. 
It must be one who came down from heaven that 
ascends to heaven. That is very natural and true 
to all experience. We can get out of a thing pre- 
cisely the power and the substance that are in it. 
The seed returning in the spring the same kind 
of richness that was packed away in it in the pre- 
ceding autumn, illustrates the truth. The water 
rising to the level of its source, the vapor return- 
ing to the heaven where once it dwelt as cloud, 
— all these tell the same story, only more emphati- 
cally and beautifully the more we know of them. 
We believe in the same truth, and rely upon it, in 



The Ascension of Christ. 337 

education and in all our dealings with men. We 
boast of our lineage of honorable ancestors, as 
some promise of what we ought to be ; we see 
with apprehension the marks of poor stock show- 
ing themselves in those under our charge ; and, 
by our hopes and our fears, our encouragement 
or condemnation, we tell the principle of the 
words, "No man hath ascended up to heaven, 
but He that came down from heaven." Men will 
go where they belong ; and, when we use the 
principle wrongly and cruelly, it is because we do 
not believe it and see it in all its force, and not 
because we believe in it too strongly or carry it 
too far. We condemn some man or child with the 
easy remark, " Oh, there is no doing any thing with 
him : he comes of bad stock." We willingly for- 
get, from sloth or prejudice, that that stock came 
from the same humanity which produces the high- 
est and noblest types ; we overlook that power 
of the personal soul, which, with all its impression 
of bad stock, came direct from God, and therefore 
has a power all its own. Had we carried our 
principle to its right conclusion, we should have 
kept all the advantage of recognizing and endeav- 
oring to correct past evil results, and have filled 
ourselves, and him for whom we labored, with 
hope of what could be done. 

And therefore, when Christ lays this principle 



338 The Ascension of Christ. 

down so generally, He states something which 
acknowledges and allows for all the differences 
among men, and at the same time fills all men with 
hope. By keeping a man's origin before him, 
He fills him with a constant sense of his destiny. 
We can understand, therefore, why, through all 
Christ's words, there runs such a constant refer- 
ence to the place from which He came. To feel 
that He was sent by the Father, armed Him, for 
all difficulties ; to preserve clear to His mind the 
fact that He came from above, filled all His life 
with the light of the great victory that was to be 
its close. And that same power which He used 
so constantly, He would give to men. *'You are 
from above," He says to all whom He meets. 
Little children received into His arms in all their 
innocence, sinners stained so that men would not 
look at them, — they all had one claim upon Him. 
** It is not the will of your Father which is in 
heaven, that one of these little ones should per- 
ish." How like a great Master of all humanity 
Christ goes to the centre of all trouble and diffi- 
culty, and touches the one thing that could give 
strength to all men at all times ! How the Ascen- 
sion, in this light, embodies the central, practical 
truth of all His teaching ! You are God's chil- 
dren : that is your only hope of heaven, He says. 
You have forgotten it ; therefore your prospects of 



The Ascension of Christ. 339 

heaven are clouded by sins, which absence from 
your God has made you commit ; therefore your 
hopes of it are dampened by discouragements, 
which the troubles of life are ever impressing upon 
you. Come unto me : I forgive the sin, and 
lighten the troubles, by telling of your relation to 
God ; and so I open heaven, from which you came. 
Surely not one loving word of forgiveness and 
encouragement would have its right meaning, 
unless He who spake it had opened the heaven 
to which it leads. Christ in a much higher form 
gives to a man that same spirit of hope and 
courage which in all times men have drawn from 
a noble ancestry ; and He gives to men that same 
motive for purity which, in the temptations and 
corruptions of city life, keeps many a young man 
pure, as he remembers the old home of his child- 
hood, and the mother who sits within, waiting for 
him to return, as simple and uncorrupted as he 
was when he went forth to his life's work. ** God 
made me for His." Simple as that fact is, it 
needed all Christ's work to reveal the Father so 
that we should feel it. But now it is ours, and we 
can use it freely and powerfully to keep ourselves 
pure, to prepare ourselves for that return thither. 

Two features of all sin this view of our claim 
on heaven will especially oppose. One is its temp- 
tation to delay, and the other the inclination to 



340 The Ascension of Christ. 

fitf Illness in moral character. Heaven, we say, 
is distant ; we will begin to prepare for it when 
we have sufficiently attended to the pressing de- 
mands of earth. But heaven came before earth 
in Christ's teaching ; we were God's before we 
were the world's. His is the prior claim, and 
therefore first to be satisfied. Imperiously it 
pushes all others aside, and says, "You owe alle- 
giance to me before all other lords." Before even 
the bands of sweetest family ties held you, surely 
before these earthly circumstances held you, of 
which you now make every thing, you were God's, 
and drew the power of your life from heaven. It 
is the one important fact, towering above all others 
with a pre-eminence that attracts by its very bold- 
ness. Realize it in all its force, and the very mo- 
tives of human ambition to obtain and to hold the 
highest, which now so often lead us wrongly toward 
the very lowest, will be found pointing to the ser- 
vice of God. 

And then, how fitful we are in our service of 
God ! We sometimes even find ourselves setting 
evil against good, excusing to-day's selfishness by 
yesterday's charity, or covering the corruption of 
the world with the worship of the Church, and 
so trusting, that, on the whole, we are making 
our way to heaven. But what pertains to our 
origin is ours at all times. A man cannot put 



The Ascension of Christ. 341 

off and assume his origin at pleasure. Whatever 
he does, of work or play, at home or abroad, that 
old time-stained genealogical tree, shut up in his 
drawer at home, still tells the spirit which should 
possess it all. And so the heavens, rightly opened 
to us, are absent from no part of our life : like the 
skies over our head, which have been taken for 
their symbol, they are visible from all parts of the 
earth's surface. The march to the heavens is 
steady, when the trumpet that marshals it is heard 
ringing through the soul in its earliest days, before 
any earthly sound has entered. We hear it thus, 
and it becomes dear to us ; we miss it when it is 
absent; and every moment is filled with the power 
of God. There is a meaning to that value of being 
religious in our childhood, far beyond the senti- 
mental one which men often put upon it. It does 
embody the central fact on which all religion 
depends: we were God's before we belonged to 
any other. 

But a man's origin is very far from being the 
whole of his life. If it were, we could write the 
history and tell the end of men at their very first 
years. But the first years see a thousand new in- 
fluences enter ; things of different origin meet and 
clash together. If men of heavenly origin are to 
come to heaven, there must be some power over 
circumstances and surroundings. And we find 



342 The Ascension of Christ. 

Christ speaking of that as the second condition of 
His Ascension: "No man hath ascended up to 
heaven, but He that came down from heaven, 
even the Son of man which is in heaven." It 
was because He was in heaven during all His life, 
that He could speak of His Ascension with such 
certainty as a permanent fact. Instead of losing 
the power of His return to the place whence 
He came, He was gaining it daily. We all of us 
know well enough what earth is, to be convinced 
that it is not heaven. Its sin, its suffering, its 
disappointments, are prominent enough in others' 
lives, if not in our own, to make us feel that it is 
far enough from being heaven. Christ appre- 
ciated all that far more than we, with our affinity 
to the dark things of earth, can ever do. He was 
a man who entered into all that was about Him ; 
He lived in no state of abstraction, as a scholar 
may walk in the midst of his fellow-men without 
seeing them, because all the time he is really in 
his study. In that sense Christ surely did not 
mean that He was in heaven. He sympathized 
with men, and helped them, and showed how really 
He was among them. And yet, in Jerusalem, ac- 
cepted by no appreciable number of men, without 
friends, in the darkness of a timid night interview. 
He could say, "I am in heaven." The side of 
those words which tell of His Divine power of om- 



The Ascension of Christ, 343 

nipresence, we can never solve, for we cannot 
understand that with our bodily limitations ; but 
we do know enough of the power of changing and 
transforming circumstances, to feel how Jesus was 
always in heaven. 

What are the circumstances that make heaven 
or hell on earth for men ? We look at some 
man endowed with all that we think makes happi- 
ness, — with honor, wealth, position, — and a cry 
of disappointment from him breaks in on the pic- 
tures of his heaven on earth that we have been 
painting. The surroundings of poverty, sickness, 
and disappointment seem to make a life as unde- 
sirable as possible ; and some expression of con- 
tentment or happiness from the very person we 
are pitying seems like a ray from heaven. It is no 
defiance of circumstances : it is the use of them in 
a way different from any which we, standing out- 
side, imagined, that makes the difference. That 
power was Christ's always. Not only He, but all 
that He had, came from the Father. Sometimes 
He could dwell upon the Father's power in the 
things around Him, and again it was the Father's 
power in Him who used those things. But it 
was always the Father's eternal presence which 
brought into unity toward the one great destiny 
His origin and His circumstances. 

That is the side of omnipresence that we can 



344 ^^^^ Ascension of Christ. 

appropriate. It belonged to Christ as the great 
eternal Son, as it never can belong to iis. But 
it was not cold, hard possession of power : it drew 
light and warmth from that fact that the Father 
was everywhere. He had omnipresence, because 
He was one with the Father. We do not hear 
Him boasting of the power; we only see Him 
using it in full sympathy with that Father's will 
and purpose. On that side, its best and richest 
one, we who through Christ are made the sons 
of God, enter into that attribute of His. The 
Father is ours ; and where we are, there He ever 
is. It is useless to rely upon our origin alone 
m order to find our way to heaven. We are like 
the delicately nurtured child lost in one of our 
streets. The very warmth and beauty of that lost 
home make the confusion of the street, the want 
of sympathy in the passers-by, the hurry and bus- 
tle, more bewildering than to one who comes from 
less attractive surroundings. The one finds his 
way home much more easily than the other. How 
easy it is to accomplish earthly purposes, compared 
to the winning of heaven ! We may tell the re- 
markable statistics of the few men who succeed in 
business ; but compare them with the lost charac- 
ters, the stained souls, about us, and we feel often 
that the earthly career is, through its certainty, 
better worth our attention than the heavenly race: 



The Ascension of Christ. 345 

and yet we were made for the latter, and not for 
the former; heaven, and not earth, was our origin. 
We must add to our hopes of heaven the fact of 
where we are and who is with us ; we must be in 
heaven now, because God is with us ; and that 
places our circumstances on the side of our origin 
in our attainment of a glorious completion to life. 
Do not say that this is impossible : that word of 
despair is only a call for the real help of Christ, 
who brought God near to us all. Only be bold 
enough to claim His presence in all that fills life 
to-day, be sure that He is in every event and duty, 
and that certainty shall turn us away from the sin 
in which we know that He is not. For he who is 
with God now, is the one that will be with Him 
hereafter. 

And there is one view of heaven that these 
words of Christ present, which we must not over- 
look. Christ's was a struggling, a working, an 
earnest, life, if ever there was one ; we cannot re- 
move that feature from it. His life was in the 
very midst of struggle in that interview with 
Nicodemus, and yet it was a life in heaven. 
Surely it tells us that heaven has within it strug- 
gle and work. That makes it worthy of us ; 
whereas I think that very often our picture of its 
ignominious ease makes it fit strangely on some 
active, earnest soul who has been taken to it or 



346 The Ascension of Christ. 

who longs for it. It gives it new power to make 
it thus the continuation of life's activity. Before 
the sound of the words, " Go ye into all the world, 
and preach the Gospel," had ceased to echo, with 
hands still outstretched in blessing, He was taken 
from them. Let the ascension, then, be the 
strength of busy feet, the power of active hands. 
Take it with you wherever those feet go and 
wherever those hands work, for it is the consecra- 
tion with the air of heaven of all this earth for 
those who know Him, who told us alike how to 
use life and how to leave it. 



XXV. 

THE KNOWLEDGE OF A TRIUNE GOD. 

*' Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself .^ God of Israel^ 
the Saviour.'^ — ISAIAH xlv. 15. 

IN this short verse, there is contained the de- 
scription of God in two characters, — as known 
and yet unknown, as revealed and yet a mystery, 
as showing and yet hiding Himself. This com- 
prehensive idea of God had been gained from 
experience. The names God of Israel and Sav- 
iour embody the remembrance of the many oc- 
casions when He had shown Himself identified 
with the nation's life and safety, as He had guided 
or protected them. And yet, running all through 
that same history had been the feature of unex- 
pectedness and strangeness in His mode of work- 
ing ; so that at last the people felt that they knew 
Him and yet did not know Him. Each new proof 
of His power and presence only introduced a new 
point at which the mystery of His being and His 
ways was felt. 

Our experience cannot be said to be greatly 

347 



34^ The Knowledge of a Triune God. 

different from the prophet's. We go over the 
life of Christ, and each point of it is a revela- 
tion of our God, telling us that He is a God 
of His people, and a Saviour ; and then we com- 
plete our thoughts with an expression of God's 
being full of hard thoughts and mystery. Christ 
as the revelation of God, leads to the doctrine of 
the Trinity. Happy shall we be if we can feel 
the unity of the two aspects of mystery and reve- 
lation as the prophet did, and join them, as he 
did, without any sense of hostility between them. 
That is the only hope of our faith in God being a 
true and steady one, as we acknowledge that He 
is our God, whom we can and do know, and feel 
also that He is forever hiding Himself, so that we 
do not know Him perfectly, as we desire and hope 
to do. 

God hides Himself. Never was there a time 
when that description of God's action was more 
common. A century ago, in the attacks on Chris- 
tianity as a revealed religion, which were miade by 
the deists, and which were thought to be so dan- 
gerous, the ground most prominently assumed by 
the assailants was the needlessness of Christian- 
ity. " Christianity as old as creation " was the 
title of a prominent deistical work : and its one 
argument was, " The religion of nature is abso- 
lutely perfect ; revelation can neither add to nor 



The Knowledge of a Triune God. 349 

take from its perfection." But all that is changed 
now. God is not seen in nature, as nature is 
looked at to-day ; it is incapable of answering one 
question about Him ; it neither proves nor dis- 
proves His existence ; His hand is outside of its 
perfect mechanism, as that mechanism is ex- 
plained to us. It is the same with human 
thought : it is not capable of knowing God, we 
are told ; there is no point at which He can enter. 
That is the last announcement of philosophy, 
which refuses to be called atheistic, because it de- 
votes itself to the silent worship of an unknown 
God. It has a God, but He is all-hidden. 

This development of an agnostic philosophy, a 
philosophy of ignorance, is only one indication of 
the drift of the time. Other and more practical 
ones are in men's thoughts and in the experiences 
of life. What has been the story of philosophy, 
as without a revelation it started to find God, has 
been the story of many a life. "God is in the 
world of action," many a conscientious man has 
said ; "let me seek Him there. There is no need 
for me to look for Him elsewhere ; let me do my 
duty as each'step in life shall show it, let me fol- 
low all guidance of reason and light that comes 
to me, and I shall find God." Let us leave out all 
developments of sin which have come from the 
worldliness and selfishness within us, and ask our- 



350 The Knowledge of a Triune God. 

selves how such a course has ever succeeded with 
us in the strictest line of duty. Views of God 
have not become more frequent or more distinct : 
gradually the thought of Him as a personal and 
leading Father has receded into the distance. 
The work became every thing ; the duty we will 
suppose to have revealed itself in all its intensity 
and extent, but there was less of God in it. 

Do not think, that, as a clergyman, I am speak- 
ing of worldly work alone ; I would join the expe- 
rience of many in that region with that of others 
in Church-work and ecclesiastical institutions. 
The experience in those directions of many earnest 
but disappointed souls is only more striking. You 
will find men wandering in every field of life who 
will tell you that the result of their experience is, 
that God is a God that hideth Himself. They do 
not deny His existence : they only say that they 
have not been able to find Him, where they feel 
sure that they had a right to look for Him. They 
have found other things, when conscientiously they 
started with a willingness to find God. They still 
want to get at Him, but their experience says that 
almost any thing else is easier to find. They have 
looked where they thought and still think Him to 
be, and have not found Him. Is not the careless- 
ness of men about religion often a form of despair } 
They rejoice that others can pray, they will help 



The Knowledge of a Triune God. 3 5 1 

them do so ; but they cannot, because God seems 
to hide Himself from them. They can but go on, 
hoping that the time will come for more knowl- 
edge, but hardly seeing how it can be so. 

Of course you expect me, as a. Christian minis- 
ter, this morning to say to all this experience, that 
the remedy is in Jesus Christ, in looking to Him 
as the personal revelation of God ; and I do say 
so with all my heart and with all the conviction 
and authority of Christian revelation. And I 
want that we should see how the demands of 
such a state of affairs are answered by special 
features of the great revealed solution. In the 
first place, however, let us notice how natural it is 
that all our difficulties about God should not be 
cleared away by the great answer. If on every 
side life defines God as one who hides Himself, 
if every experience tells us, that, when we have 
gone forth to search for Him, we have been baf- 
fled, is it any wonder, that, as we turn to the new 
information, points of darkness still remain ? Is 
not our success to be measured, not by the dark- 
ness that remains, but by the light that comes "^ 
If the Christian revelation still leaves points unex- 
plained, and still makes us live by faith, that 
characteristic only assimilates it to all our other 
experiences, and tells us of its naturalness and of 
the way in which it belongs to us. We should 



352 The Knowledge of a Triune God. 

suspect any theory that did not still tell us of God 
as a hiding God, when every other side of life so 
tells us of Him. We feel that there is a certain 
naturalness to that fact, arising from God's true 
relation to us; just as a child may play with his 
father, and be at ease in his presence, and yet 
trust him completely, only because he feels that 
there is so much in him that he does not under- 
stand, and does not pretend even to touch. This 
universal experience as to God's hiding of Him- 
self ought to tell us that it is of His very nature. 
He is ours : that is the reason that failure after 
failure will not allow the heart of man to give 
Him up. He is above us, greater than we are : 
that is the reason that it is hard to find Him. 
We do not want Him to give up His greatness : 
that would be to lose our God in the very act of 
finding Him. Do not be discouraged, then, as dif- 
ficulties present themselves in Christian state- 
ment, or religious thought, or spiritual experience ; 
do not say that such difficulties prove the falsity 
of the revelation. But see them all as only pre- 
serving that greatness and wonder and mystery 
of a God, who holds us and all the world in His 
keeping. 

But if we may not ask, and do not want to ask, 
that all mystery should be removed, what may we 
look for .<* Surely for the removal of the sting of 



The Knowledge of a Triune God. 353: 

that old difficulty of the hiding of God. The great 
revelation of Him must be able to put with that 
mystery, which it still preserves, all the things 
which have made men claim and hope that God 
was not a mystery. First, there is the feeling that. 
God is in the world, and especially in men and ia 
the life which men are leading. We hear that 
there is a God, and we want to know Him ; and it 
is most natural to say, *'I will find Him in this life 
of man, which is the highest and most spiritual, 
thing that I know of in the world." One of the: 
hardest features of that baffled experience, at which 
we have glanced, is the disappointment at feeling; 
that God is not near to us, and that we must go> 
into some strange region for Him. We have looked 
at the highest paths of life, and He was not there; 
and it is the drawing-back from that strange re- 
gion, beyond and outside of all daily experience 
and knowledge, that makes men's aversion to 
religion. 

Now go into the very centre of the revelation 
of God, close to its greatest mystery, — that of 
the Trinity, — and what is its first great positive 
truth.'* God was present in the world; He came 
into it, He lived in it; human life was His. It was 
because He loved man, respected his being, valued 
his life, that He came. That is the great truth of 
God the Son. It is from that truth that the for- 



354 ^^-'^ Knowledge of a Triune God. 

•rnulated doctrine of a Trinity starts. It contains, 
ttherefore, just what men are looking and asking 
.for in all their search for God in those many paths 
■of human life in which they are only able to 
come to the conclusion that He is a God that 
hideth Himself. Now we can use nature, can use 
human life, can use daily experience, as a means 
.of getting to God, for we have the point of connec- 
ition in that thought, that "the Father sent the 
,Son ;" and as we follow that Son's life hither and 
thither, over those same paths that we are follow- 
ing every day, bringing His experiences and ours 
together, we learn of God. 

If men would only see that the doctrine of a 
Trinity has its first ground in the longing of God 
to get near to man, I think that it would not so 
■ often be pronounced hard, cold, and useless. We 
.should all see how to use it. When life and the 
vworld seemed cruel and disappointing, seemed to 
'be discouraging us from any attempt to find God, 
then we would turn to our doctrine of God, and, 
gathering re-assurance from the announcement 
that there is in the Godhead, not only the power of 
sitting afar off in mysterious grandeur, but also the 
power of coming near to each one of us, and being 
one with us, we should take up our life again with 
new courage, and go back to the world with new 
confidence, feeling sure that God is in it, and is 



The Knowledge of a Triune God. 355 

not beyond meeting us there. How many de- 
mands of a false naturalism, which says God is the 
power immanent in nature ; of a pantheism, which, 
saying God is everywhere, makes every thing God, 
and loses all sight of a personal God ; of worldli- 
ness, which, magnifying daily life and duty, grows 
into forgetfulness and carelessness of God, — how 
many of these have full room for true expansion 
and use in our idea of God ! Just as a child may 
do with benefit and profit many things under his 
father's roof which are full of danger and tempta- 
tion in other surroundings, so, holding to our faith 
in God, as He has showed Himself to us, we have 
an idea of God's eternal presence with His crea- 
ture, man, and of the way in which God and man 
are bound together, which in any other connection 
would most dangerously diminish the distance be- 
tween Him and us. In constant .faith of such a 
great God, men have felt the presence of a Saviour 
supporting them, and a Spirit guiding them, and 
declared, ''Though Thou art a God that hideth 
Thyself, Thou art my God and my Saviour." 

Another characteristic of our search for God is, 
that w^e want Him to be like us in character and 
feeling. If He is not, we do not see how we can 
form any estimate of Him, and know Him at all. 
And yet that desire to have Him like us has led 
to such evil results, that men often distrust it. It 



35^ The Knowledge of a Triune God. 

has so generally resulted in making a man's God 
only an unnaturally magnified reflection of his 
own character, that the pictures thus produced 
have been any thing but attractive. They have so 
often had cruelty, hatred, and narrowness in them, 
that men, rejecting such representations, have said, 
''We cannot know God, He is so different from 
us ; He is a God that hideth Himself." 

We turn again to that revealed picture of our 
God as it is given in the thought of a Trinity, and 
we find that it contains the very central idea of 
human life, — mutual feeling and relation. It is 
that mutual feeling which, under the influence of 
sin, leads to the contests and bitternesses of 
^' human action, which makes one man the enemy 
of another ; but it is also that power of feeling 
toward each other, which binds us all together in 
the unity of friendship, family, and race. Division 
under unity is the great characteristic of all life ; 
by that alone all the movement of life is sustained. 
God reveals Himself to us, and we see the same 
thing in Him when we hear of that division of 
persons in the one Godhead. It is full of the 
mystery which belongs to One infinitely above us. 
But it is the assurance that God is as we are, so 
that we can understand Him ; it is the destruction 
of that tantalizing idea, that we know that there 
is a God, only to feel that there is nothing more 



Th? Kxwiedge of a Triune God. 357 

about Him that we can know. That is one of the 
bitterest ideas that ever possessed the mind of 
man. But our hearts burn with the best feelings 
of life, — love to those who are bound to us by- 
ties which God's own hand has made, — and then 
we know that that feeling is worthy of immortal 
souls; that God can sympathize with it, for *Hhe 
Father loveth the Son." We are impressed with 
ideas of morality, of duty toward our fellow-men ; 
and we see that those thoughts, regulating all our 
relations, are guiding us to eternal life, and pre- 
paring us to live with God, for there is mutual 
action in that Godhead, as the Spirit takes of the 
things of Christ, and shows them unto us. 

We know not the particulars of that relation ; 
farther than that we cannot go. We use, because 
we have been told that we may do so, our rela- 
tion of father and son as figures to express it ; 
we blindly call the relation within the Godhead 
that of persons. But only to know that there is 
such a relation, and the possibility of it, that 
is the blessing. That gives us a true connec- 
tion with our God ; that makes us confident in 
going on, and making that connection a reality; 
that makes us look up to God for sympathy and 
guidance in our relations to each other ; that as- 
sures us that we can be like God, not as Eve tried 
to be, when she first fell into sin, by searching out 



358 The Knowledge of a Trhme God, 

for herself the secrets of good and evil, but by 
relying upon that God who alone knows the true 
meaning of how to be good, and who can teach it 
to us. We are not to mystify ourselves by any 
numerical or mathematical conceptions of the 
Three in One, but we can see that it reveals a 
positive truth to us, without which God would not 
be ours ; and then we can pray and look to that 
God with more courage and confidence to help us 
fulfil all the relations of life, and so be His chil- 
dren indeed. 

One more difficulty in our search for God is in 
finding the marks of His personal presence as a 
ruler of minutest affairs. We lose Him just as we 
get nearest to individual action. It is easy to 
think of Him as a great world-power, but does He 
care for the falling sparrow.-^ There other causes 
seem to rule. We think of His ruling the sun and 
moon and stars; but each one of us has to light 
his lamp in his own dwelling. Once more it is 
the bad and superstitious use of that idea of God's 
personal presence which has made men distrust it, 
and say, "God cannot be thought of thus." But 
yet we cannot spare that truly personal idea of 
God's individual interest in all persons and all 
events. We want to find something more than 
our own power in the nearest events of life, if we 
are to keep God at all. 



The Knowledge of a Triune God. 359 

And so we turn to our revealed doctrine again, 
and that careful designation of purposes re-assures 
us. Our God is one for creation, salvation, and 
guidance. He knows us and our needs ; we can 
feel Him present on every occasion. Our life, in- 
dividual and personal, in its wants and necessities, 
is met by His equally personal power and adapta- 
tion. We need not be afraid that He will fail us. 
We may not see how, at each point, the supply 
will come ; but the great thought is clear, that our 
God is more than a world machine, whose work 
our individual hands must take up and finish off 
in nice detail, and for finer uses : He is a personal 
God, knowing us, and meeting us at every point ; 
and our varied wants are covered by His greater 
wisdom. We see that, in all that is told us of 
what He is and what He has done. It is all of a 
nature to assure us that there is a power and pres- 
ence of God in each smallest event. 

Have we gained any conception of the Trinity 
as a revelation by thus noting these positive fea- 
tures of union with human nature, true mutual 
relation, and declaration of personal action which 
it contains "^ If so, we can rejoice in it, and it can 
help us. Life is hard enough, God knows. He 
would not bind a new theological burden, and lay 
it on our backs. Do not commit the violence of 
laying such a charge to the great loving One. Pil- 



360 The Knowledge of a Triune God. 

grim's burden fell off at the sight of the Cross ; 
and so, at the true sight of God as Christ has 
showed Himself to us to-day, our burden of doubt 
is to fall off, as we know how near our God is to 
our life, our nature, and our wants. Take God by 
faith, not in a mysterious doctrine, but in the liv- 
ing Christ, and the revelation of God shall be seen 
to be full of light, breaking in on the clouds of 
earth and of sin, and helping us every day to know 
more of that God who, though He hideth Himself, 
is our Father, our Saviour, and our Guide. 



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